The death of “engagement”

24 June 2025 Reading Time: 4 minutes

by Howard Krais:

I’ve worked in the employee communications space for about thirty years. For as long as I’ve done it, employee communication has gone together with engagement, much like a tub of popcorn at the movies.

Looking at various recent reports and taking into the account the focus I’ve had on listening over recent years, I find myself thinking something that not long ago would never have crossed my mind. That is, I believe we are witnessing the death of engagement as a meaningful concept.

Let me repeat that for those at the back – the death of engagement.

For me, engagement is done, it is washed up. It is no longer of value (if it ever really was) and it is certainly not a measure that should be used to headline the value of employee communications (or HR).

This might be a controversial view. It might be fanciful. Perhaps I’m wrong?

Let me set out the case for the prosecution.

Do we agree on what engagement means?

I find it problematic that there is no one agreed definition for employee engagement. We accept it probably means something about employees giving discretionary effort or having emotional buy-in to what the company is trying to achieve.

Engage for Success, who were originally asked by the UK government to write a report that included answering the question what Employee Engagement is, described it as the following:

“Employee engagement is a workplace approach resulting in the right conditions for all members of an organisation to give of their best each day, committed to their organisation’s goals and values, motivated to contribute to organisational success, with an enhanced sense of their own well-being”.

Qualtrics, the research company, define employee engagement as “how much an employee is committed to helping their organisation achieve its goals”. They say it is a demonstration of how employees think, feel, and act, as well as the emotional connection employees feel towards their organisation, their work, and their team.

Different definitions pick up a different things like wellbeing or happiness or pride and so on. This flows through to how engagement is measured. In many companies, engagement is an output of a large-scale census survey carried out annually (even every two years in some cases). This is a moment in time measurement which well-meaning in theory can often cause more frustration in practice.

What really happens with engagement surveys?

When survey time comes around there can be as much, if not more, effort on the peripherals such as data cleansing or response rates, as there is on truly understanding the results and driving meaningful improvement.

While I appreciate the survey world is changing fast and businesses are looking at more regular, smaller scale pulse surveys, we understand that the survey fatigue experienced in many businesses is not that they do too many surveys but rather too many surveys where nothing is seen to happen as a result.

Yet it is these surveys, measuring as many things as the ‘Centre’ thinks they can crowbar in, which are used to give us the engagement metric that is often the key measure for an internal comms team.

My experience is that businesses, mostly quite conservative in their outlook, then set themselves some arbitrary target of raising their engagement score from say 65% to 75% in the next five years, perhaps because they are advised that 75% will get them into the so-called “top quartile”.

What does this mean? Does anyone really know the benefits to expect moving from 65 to 75 or the effort required to get there? If the engagement score was deemed that important, wouldn’t a CEO say something like “I won’t be happy until the engagement score in my company is over 90% because only then can I be confident we are winning!”

If you accept one of the above definitions of engagement then you will appreciate that understanding employee motivations is complex and human. Reducing engagement to a simple number, risks driving behaviours that manage numbers rather than encouraging greater listening and understanding of people.

Instead of measuring an arbitrary number that has little meaning we need to see HR and communications linking their work to something meaningful for the organisation, for example increasing sales or productivity, in other words hardwiring what we do to the key business metrics that make leaders sit up.

The state of engagement

Even if we are trying to manage numbers, and complex definitions, then when you look at some of the recent reports the evidence is damning.

Gallup’s recent ‘State of the Global Workplace’ report tells us that Global Workplace was 21%, in Europe the figure is just 13%. Let those numbers sink in. Gallup are saying that only one in five people (one in eight in Europe) agree they are engaged at work.

Now you might not give much credence to these studies but if Gallup are right then why bother? Are we not fooling ourselves if we think that we can turn these figures around given how many years we’ve been at it?

If not engagement then what?

Let’s be clear about one thing. My argument is not that people don’t matter in an organisation – it is quite the contrary.

I have worked in businesses where leaders understand the importance of bringing employees with them. It is powerful. When people-centred leaders come together with like-minded HR and Communications professionals magic can happen.

Taking a people-centred approach means providing your people with the time and space to have the right conversations. This dialogue is important so your people can understand why things are happening and what it means for them and their colleagues. It also means listening to what they have to say, with the term listening meaning being seen to respond appropriately to what you hear.

Think about the issues people have these days, perhaps what the future use of AI means or how to navigate between remote working and being back in the office, responding to our people’s concerns, questions and suggestions can turn difficult issues into a strength.

When you do that – and there are many ways to listen – then you deliver real value. My work informs us that the benefits that communicators and HR professionals demonstrate from listening include helping leaders to make better business decisions, mitigating risk, supporting improved productivity and sales while also improving change acceptance.

These are all meaningful and enable us to show we are influencing the key indicators of a business. This is liable not only to get the attention of leaders but also to keep it in a way that engagement never does.

What is clear to me is that investing in a people-centred approach is a critical success factor in a business, it just might not be based on the key metric we’ve previously thought.

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To connect with Howard Krais and to talk more about listening, you can find Howard on LinkedIn, or via howard@true-comms.com.

You can buy a copy of ‘Leading the Listening Organisation’ here.

Written by: Editor