A Crisis of Engagement - what's the answer?

Welcome to another week! How are you feeling? Well, if you’re a manager or the leader of others, please sip that coffee, take a deep breath and contemplate the gravity of the task ahead.

For over 50 years, Gallup has tracked workplace hashtag#engagement. The headline figures often grab the attention, but when you dive below the waterline, the 2025 data is wholly dispiriting — and that’s based on a dataset of over 5 million employees globally.

Globally, only 21% of employees are classified as “engaged”.  Meanwhile, 62% are “not engaged” and 17% are “actively disengaged”.  In Europe, the situation is worse: just 13% are engaged.  In the UK specifically, engagement is closer to 10%, with more actively hashtag#disengaged than engaged! 😬

In short: if you are trying to grow and progress a new strategy across the UK and Europe, only a small fraction are truly “on board”, around three-quarters don’t care, and worse, a noticeable minority are actively hostile.

What’s especially troubling is that despite the most significant realignment of work since COVID - remote, hybrid and flexible working becoming the norm, there is no engagement dividend. Engagement has dropped below 2020 levels.

I know none of this applies to your organisation...but regardless of your own internal measures, I have been arguing for some time now that we need a new kind of leadership — one that is fit for the way we now work and live our lives. Organisations need to recalibrate for a world where your most valuable people are harder to find and where it’s more important than ever to embrace them and equip them to rebuild organisations that don’t just survive, but thrive.

In 2026, the only way out of this is a change in the skills, behaviours and mindset of organisational leaders — and the creation of organisations that harness people’s energy and skills in new ways. And fundamentally to that is the creation of hashtag#glue.

As we think about navigating this productivity malaise in 2026, and if you would like to explore ideas about the organisational advantage of deeper engagement, building social capital, embracing your most valuable people, and, above all, creating much-needed organisation glue, please let’s talk.