If 70% of senior executives say employee engagement is now a top priority, why can’t they agree on what engagement actually means?
That’s exactly what our latest Future of Work Index research uncovered. Nearly 40% of leaders define engagement as “employee commitment to the business.” Sounds reasonable enough — except more than 60% reject that definition completely.
Think about what that means. Most executives are prioritizing something they can’t collectively define. They’re allocating budgets, launching initiatives, and measuring success against goals that mean different things to different people in the same organization.
When leadership teams can’t align on what they’re trying to achieve, building a coherent strategy becomes nearly impossible. And while executives work through competing definitions, employees are left trying to meet expectations nobody can articulate clearly.
Only 23% of employees feel truly engaged at work, and that disengagement is costing the global economy $8.8 trillion annually, according to Gallup. That’s 9% of global GDP walking out the door because we’re asking people to show up for something we haven’t clearly defined.
This is a leadership opportunity, not just a workforce problem. Closing this gap requires building shared understanding across the organization and giving employees a clear picture of what engagement looks like and why it matters. That means creating infrastructure for connection before measuring commitment, building the conditions where genuine engagement can happen rather than just tracking survey scores.
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Why the Gap Keeps Widening, and Why Traditional Fixes Aren’t Working
The definition problem runs deeper than semantics. Leaders are measuring engagement through survey scores and retention rates, while employees navigate daily realities that those metrics don’t capture.
The burnout crisis reveals this disconnect clearly. Over half of employees experienced burnout in the past year, yet many leaders still interpret “engagement” as working harder or showing more commitment. Burned-out employees need better systems and support, not lectures about dedication.
Consider the structural challenges employees face. Financial stress affects 37% of workers. Unmanageable workloads hit 58%. Poor work-life balance impacts 49%. Communication campaigns won’t solve problems that require workplace redesign.
The employee experience has fragmented across dozens of tools, multiple locations, and disconnected communication channels. When people can’t find information, reach colleagues, or join conversations, engagement becomes impossible, regardless of intent or initiative spending.
We’ve been treating engagement as an employee problem to solve rather than a workplace design opportunity. The good news is that once we recognize this as a design challenge, we can actually fix it.
So what does real engagement look like when we start defining it through the employee experience?
Redefining Engagement Through Connection, Not Commitment
Real engagement comes from creating a genuine connection to work, colleagues, and purpose. Engaged employees believe they’re doing meaningful work, have autonomy to make decisions, receive recognition for contributions, and understand how their work connects to organizational direction.
Connection requires infrastructure. I’ve watched organizations launch engagement initiatives that fail because employees still can’t find the information they need, collaborate across departments, or join conversations happening in channels they don’t know exist.
Take a distributed team working across three continents. Leadership announces a new engagement platform and considers the problem solved. But if that platform doesn’t integrate with existing tools, support the languages people speak, or surface relevant information, it becomes another frustration point.
The modern workforce is distributed, multilingual, and working across multiple platforms. Traditional top-down communication creates information silos. Recognition, belonging, and psychological safety are structural requirements for sustainable engagement.
Many leadership teams think engagement comes from big initiatives and annual events, but what actually moves metrics? Daily access to information. Regular recognition. Clear growth paths. Tools that work together.
Building Shared Understanding Across Your Organization
Closing this engagement gap means changing how we build and measure engagement. Here are a few strategies to get you started:
- Start with alignment. Leadership needs to agree on what engagement means from the employee perspective, not just the business perspective. That conversation should happen before allocating a single dollar to engagement initiatives.
- Build infrastructure for connection. Centralize communication so people aren’t hunting across multiple platforms. Make information accessible regardless of location, department, or language. Enable collaboration across boundaries that traditionally create silos.
- Measure what matters. Track leading indicators like communication quality, information accessibility, cross-functional collaboration, and employee voice. Stop relying solely on lagging survey scores that tell you about problems months after they started.
- Create feedback loops that actually inform change. Connection works both ways. Employees need systems that let them contribute ideas, question decisions, and shape direction, not just receive messages from the top.
- Invest in the long game. Engagement isn’t a quarterly initiative you launch and forget. It’s ongoing organizational design work that requires sustained attention and resources.
The engagement gap will continue widening until leaders stop asking “How do we get employees more committed?” and start asking “How do we build workplaces worth committing to?” The answer lies in rethinking how we connect people to purpose, information, and each other.
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