Are People Checking Out? What Your Leadership Can Do About Engagement Now
- Jelena Suboticki Berar
- Nov 8, 2025
- 8 min read
Updated: Nov 8, 2025
For many companies, the time for big-picture result reviews is approaching. You're preparing to look at strategy, OKRs, KPIs, and other critical metrics. One of the key People & Culture areas that must be reviewed is the progress made on the employee engagement action plan.
This review is urgent for those who run their annual or bi-annual surveys early in the year. If you survey later (which is usually May-June or September-October), you have a bit more time for the final count. Still, a year-end review is beneficial. Here are some key ideas on what you can improve for next time and what leaders can do while the People & Culture team is managing the process, because leaders must champion the action and the change.
And here is why P&C and leadership should prioritize this:
Gallup regularly does a meta-analysis on their long-running Q12 Engagement Survey. Here are some key differences in business outcomes when comparing the most engaged (top 25%) vs. the least engaged (bottom 25%) companies:
More Positive Outcomes:
70% higher wellbeing.
23% higher profit.
18% higher sales productivity.
14% higher productivity.
10% higher customer loyalty.
Fewer Negative Outcomes:
78% less absenteeism.
51% less turnover (in low-turnover companies) and 21% less turnover (in high-turnover companies).
63% fewer safety issues.
32% fewer quality defects.
The Top 3 Engagement Traps to Avoid
Drawing from my experience with people engagement in companies of various sizes and industries, I found these three factors to be the biggest problems:
Trap 1: Employees Don't Trust the Follow-Up
Employees must trust, based on past experience, that giving honest feedback in a survey is worth the time because the company will make real changes based on what they say.
Trap 2: Only The Leadership Team Plans the Action
You must involve and truly listen to everyone. This means getting qualitative feedback from all employees, not just the survey numbers, and channeling it through their managers who are honestly interested.
Trap 3: Improvement Progress Is Not Shared
You need to track the progress and openly share updates on improvements with everyone involved. That means all employees.
Resolution for Trap 1: Measure "Action Confidence"
This is a simple thing you can address with one question, and it has a huge impact: Do employees believe the company will use the survey results to make improvements?
Make this Action Confidence score a top priority in your engagement survey results (maybe even a company KPI if there is a bad legacy in this domain and if engagement is a strategic goal). Focusing leadership's attention on this will naturally lead to better overall engagement.
According to a Culture Amp survey from July 2025, this trust is currently at decline. More employees say their companies offer chances to talk about survey results, but fewer believe their companies will actually act on the results. On the other hand, Qualtrics research shows people are 12 times more likely to recommend their employer if they feel their feedback is heard and acted upon.
The message is clear: Don't do a survey if you won't fix things, or if you don't show people the changes you made based on their input.
Resolution for Trap 2: Involve Everyone in the Action Planning
A common error is when the leadership team creates the plan without involving the rest of the employees. This plan is often far from the reality "on the ground" and doesn't match what employees would suggest.
Listen to employee feedback on the results and why they think the scores are like that. The scores themselves do not mean much without further explanation from people. Conduct listening sessions to hear feedback from all employees. It pays off, as evidenced by the results above.
Resolution for Trap 3: Regular Tracking and Full Accountability
This means you need regular monitoring:
a. Pulse Surveys: These are an early warning system. If the employee experience starts to get worse, they give you time to notice and react quickly. Pulse checks might seem like extra work at first. However, if you add them to the bi-weekly, monthly or quarterly manager-employee check-in process using an employee experience tool or performance management tool (e.g. Qualtrics, Culture Amp, 15Five, etc.), they are no longer a burden.
With pulse checks, people give feedback more often, and organizations can respond faster. If you’re applying design thinking to improve engagement, pulse surveys can be tailored to the teams where you’re testing new ideas and solutions.
b. Quarterly Company Town Halls: You need regular updates on the action plan's progress. Everyone must follow the improvement plan, and everyone should have a role in it. The company is a system; seven executive leaders or a 10-person P&C team cannot drive change alone. This practice will also keep the whole leadership team responsible and accountable.
Internal Comms and Employer Branding (if company has people acting in these roles) can serve as powerful amplifiers of engagement:
Internal Comms teams make progress visible, connect dots across departments, and turn engagement updates into clear, human messages that people can actually relate to. They help leaders communicate why certain actions matter and build understanding instead of noise.
Employer Branding experts also play a key role. With their perspective on the company’s EVP and desired people experience, they help ensure that the story employees live inside the company matches the story shared outside. Their insights can highlight what truly attracts and retains talent, and how the engagement efforts contribute to that promise.
When both functions work hand in hand, they not only support accountability but also help turn engagement from an internal initiative into a part of the company’s reputation and identity.
*Other typical mistakes that I’ve seen more than once include: doing the survey only because "we always do it" (maintaining the status quo without a clear reason), leaders pushing for overly good results, pressure to "just fill it out to get HR off our backs," surveys with too many questions "just in case," or using generic questions without trying to understand your company's specific needs. These are all serious issues that need to be fixed, and there are best practices on how to fix them, but the previous three are sometimes seen even in companies with the majority of the process already well sorted out.
Why Even Do the Survey if Nothing Ever Changes?
Many leaders think and feel like this. They see the whole work around the people engagement as an overhead and they question its purpose.
The response can be simple - if nothing changes, then please don't do it.
If you run a survey and then change nothing, you waste money/time, and you create mistrust. Your people will feel like you are doing things just for show, and that when they share something important, nothing happens. That is the opposite of helpful. If you currently don't have the organizational capability or other resources to do the work properly, it might be better not to do it at all.
So, why should you do an engagement survey?
Because if you avoid the mistakes above, you will have better business results, including better employee wellbeing (70%) and higher company profit (23%), as mentioned above.
Also, do it because the facts in the biggest engagement studies are changing fast. You need to know what is happening in your company:
Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace, 2025 Report says that global employee engagement dropped to 21% in 2024, and the drop was largest for managers. This is only the second time engagement has fallen in more than a decade.
Culture Amp reports in their bi-annual update from July 2025 that employee engagement is still going down, continuing the trend since the pandemic. Employee pride dropped by 4%, and more employees are thinking about quitting than last year.
Something must be done. We cannot ignore the external world (and you should analyze it in PESTLE): wars, political instability, macroeconomic factors, AI disruption, and other (un)expected changes. All that impacts people overall and their work life as well. One of the intriguing signals in the Culture Amp update is that since 2022, employees’ energy to manage the pace of work, overall sentiment about work, and sense of being valued by their managers have all declined. Yet, at the same time, employees reported an improvement in their ability to switch off. Is this a sign of progress in work-life balance, or a sign of widening disconnection? Anyway, it should not be left unaddressed.
What Makes People Engaged?
Four things consistently drive engagement worldwide: the work itself (including chances for growth), confidence and trust in leaders, recognition and rewards, and clear and timely company communication.
Based on the Culture Amp update in July 2025, the top three drivers of engagement are:
Confidence in leaders
Leaders showing that people matter to the company's success
Whether the company helps the employee grow their skills
While the presentation of engagement drivers may differ across cultures, they usually involve these main areas. When working with survey results, keep these drivers in mind. Don't focus too much on specific questions, they are just signs. You need to understand the deeper meaning through company-wide talks, employee groups, and culture committees, and address it with action plans, projects across teams, and specific team efforts. Drivers are the powerful points that can make a difference if you understand and work on them.
What Great Leaders Actually Do About Engagement?
From my experience, leadership awareness and effort is the key. In companies where we managed to boost engagement from around 70% to above 80% over the years, the whole leadership team, not just P&C team, had a clear understanding of the purpose and was dedicated to the work as a continuous process, not just a yearly task imposed by the P&C team or the headquarters.
A Culture Amp survey comparison between the top 25% of companies and those in the middle (around the 50th percentile) shows leadership is the main difference. Their data suggests that when employees trust their leaders' ability, vision, and follow-through, it can act as a “shield” for engagement when there are outside pressures.
This insight aligns completely with what I’ve observed in real projects. When leaders step in as true owners of engagement, everything changes.
In the most successful engagement projects I’ve participated in, leaders played three crucial roles. They didn’t wait for P&C to “own” engagement. They owned it themselves.
They really listen. They thank people for speaking up, accept feedback without defensiveness, and make it clear that honesty is valued, not punished.
They involve people. They enable employees (including P&C specialists) to co-create engagement improvements by joining working groups, testing new ideas, and adjusting the “big yearly action plan” as they learn what truly works.
They act on two levels. They take care of both company-wide priorities and their own team’s specific engagement actions, treating both as equally important.
When leaders take these roles seriously, engagement stops being a survey result or a box-ticking exercise. It becomes a daily practice of listening, experimenting, and learning together.
If your leaders need help understanding the purpose and leadership role in managing people engagement, especially in the context of evolving workplace conditions, this is what we do at Leadership Guild. This leadership development program is built to help participants enhance their adaptability for new times, their emotional intelligence, and their ability to foster human-centric leadership. Additionally, for People & Culture teams seeking to refine their engagement practices and deepen their impact, mentoring support is the solution.
