The Great Unraveling: Employee Engagement Just Hit a 10-Year Low

Employee engagement just hit a 10-year low, dropping from 36% to 31% since 2020. That’s 8 million workers who’ve checked out.

But here’s what the headlines miss: role clarity collapsed, feeling cared about plummeted, and organizations are responding with “practice gratitude” instead of fixing anything.

In this episode, we’re breaking down what Gallup’s new data really reveals about systemic workplace dysfunction, why younger workers are getting crushed, and what you can actually control when conditions are deteriorating.

It’s not you. It’s the system.

Link to article: https://www.gallup.com/workplace/701486/employee-engagement-declines-2020-peak.aspx

Check out the detailed show notes (https://tarakermiet.com/podcast/) and leave your thoughts or questions about today's topic.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Well, hello friend. I'm glad you are listening today because we need to talk about some data that dropped last week from Gallup that should be making every organization in America deeply uncomfortable.

So Gallup just released their latest employee engagement numbers. And look, I've been doing this work long enough. That data doesn't usually surprise me. It saddens me, but it doesn't surprise me. I mean, I hear what you're going through every single day in my practice. But when I dug into this report and I started connecting it to other research that came out over the past year or so, I realized that we're not just looking at a bad quarter or a post pandemic adjustment.

We're really looking at a systemic collapse. So here's the basic headline. Employee engagement dropped from 36% in 2020 to 31% in 2025. Now to sum a 5% drop might not seem like a whole lot, just a little drop in the bucket, but that's actually 8 million fewer engaged [00:01:00] employees in just five years, and we're essentially back to 2014 levels after a decade of steady growth and improvement in this area.

But that headline barely scratches the surface because when you dig into who's getting crushed, what's actually breaking down and how organizations are responding, you start to see a pattern that connects to everything I talk about in my practice, the conditions, the culture, and the convictions that are driving people to burnout.

Now here's what really got me younger workers, my genzer and younger millennials saw engagement drop by eight to nine points. But it's not just that they're less engaged, they're actually reporting a 13 point drop in feeling cared about at work, 13 points and an 11 point drop in having opportunities to learn and grow.

Now, if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you know that I don't do the whole kids these days thing, and I'm not interested in going on about [00:02:00] generational differences right now. That's a whole nother episode. But what I am interested in is what this data tells us about the systems that are breaking down and what you, the person listening to this, who's probably feeling some version of this yourself, what you can actually do about it.

So for today's episode, we're gonna dig into what's really happening. I'm gonna walk us through kind of three major revelations that I took away from this data. I'm gonna connect it to my five Cs driving burnout framework, and I'm gonna give you the language to understand whether what you're experiencing is you, or whether it's the conditions that you're working in.

Because here's what I know from working with folks like you, you're already wondering if it's you. You're already asking if you're not resilient enough, not grateful enough, or just not cut out for this and this data. When you really dig into it and understand it should hopefully put that question to rest.

All right, let's get into it. So for the first revelation, I'm calling this the great [00:03:00] regression. Now here's what I mean by that. In 2020, employee engagement peaked at 36%. That was the highest it had been in a decade of steady growth and trajectory. There. And at first glance, that seems pretty weird, right?

Because if you think about it, 2020 was a complete dumpster fire with the pandemic. We had uncertainty and everything kind of moving online overnight. Why would engagement go up? But here's my thought on why. So organizations actually did the things that drive engagement. They were communicating constantly.

They clarify priorities over and over. There was probably over communication, to be honest. a lot of times they were showing that they cared about employees as humans. They were checking in on the safety of their people, asking if their families were okay and just regularly touching base on what folks needed.

They were also giving people flexibility because they kind of had to just with the quick pivot, and we often heard like we're all figuring this out together [00:04:00] instead of just pretending that everybody had all the answers. Right. That was crisis management and it worked, but, and this is the critical, but that wasn't culture change.

That was organizations operating in survival mode, doing what they had to do to keep functioning. And as soon as they felt like the crisis was over, they tried to go back to normal. Remember that when we were all talking about, let's just go back to normal, except they didn't go back to where they were.

They actually fell below it. So now we're sitting at 31% engagement, five points below the 2020 peak, and we've lost all the gains from a decade of improvement. We're literally back to 2014. But the workforce is different, the economy is different, and people's expectations are different because they saw what was possible.

Lemme give you some context on what normal looks like now. So recent Aflac [00:05:00] data shows 72% of US employees face moderate to high stress at work. Actually, it's moderate to very high stress. Mercer found that 82% of employees are at risk of burnout. 82%. Think about that. That's a very large number. And then here's another number that really should stop you in your tracks.

Chronic workplace stress contributes to 120,000 deaths every year in the United States, like shit. This isn't about people being a little stressed or not loving their jobs. This is an actual public health crisis and younger workers are experiencing this harder and earlier than any generation before them.

Separate research has found that Gen Z's average job tenure in their first five years is 1.1 years, and if you compare that to millennials, that's 1.8 years for them. 2.8 for Gen X and 2.9 for boomers. And the thing is, [00:06:00] they're not job hopping because they're flighty. Like everyone likes to judge them for.

They're actually responding rationally to conditions that are literally making them sick, And those conditions are getting worse. Not better. Global job postings for entry level roles. So jobs requiring zero to two years of experience have declined by 29 percentage points since January, 2024. Junior tech roles are down 35%. Logistics is down 25%, and finance is down 24%.

So you've got a generation entering the workforce, being told they need experience to get entry level jobs, but those jobs aren't there because they're disappearing. And then when they do get the job, they're finding organizations that abandon all the practices that drove engagement in 2020.

So here's what I want you to understand. This connects directly to what I call the conditions in my five Cs framework. Conditions are the structural systemic realities of your workplace. [00:07:00] I like to think of it like the logistics. They're the things that exist before you even show up. And right now the conditions are deteriorating across the board.

Role clarity, for example, which is just knowing what's expected of you dropped nine points overall since 2020. When Gallup asked people what would help them gain clarity about their expectations, 35% said better communication. That's it. Just tell me what you want from me. And organizations can't even do that.

The flexibility trap is real, too Remote and hybrid work gave people better work life balance. 76% reported on that, but 81% of remote workers now check email outside of work hours, 63% on weekends and 34% on vacation. I know I've done it in the past and I'm gonna guess that you have too. The boundaries essentially have collapsed, but organizations didn't create new structures.

They just expected people to [00:08:00] figure it out while working more hours than ever before. This is exactly what regression looks like. We learned something important in 2020. That communication, clarity, and care actually matter. And then we collectively decided to unlearn that and basically say, fuck it all. Okay, so the second revelation is the leadership void. So here's a stat from Gallup that really did kind of floor me. Less than one third of leaders strongly agree that they know what exceptional performance looks like in their role leaders, okay?

The people supposedly setting the standard for all of us and then for everyone else, including managers and individual contributors, only about one in five have that clarity. So let's think about what that means. If four out of five people in your organization don't know what exceptional performance actually looks like, how the hell can anyone know if they're [00:09:00] succeeding?

How can you even set goals? How can you develop people? How can you effectively give feedback? Well, the answer is, quite frankly, you can't, and that's exactly what's happening. And here's more data that connects to this. Trusted managers dropped from 46% in 2022 to 29% in 2024. That's a 17 point drop in two years. Deloitte's 2025 research found that only 26% of organizations report their managers are very or extremely effective at enabling team performance. And managers themselves, only 31% are actually engaged, so you have disengaged managers trying to engage disengaged employees, and nobody has clear definitions of success.

It is quite literally the blind leading the blind. And let me tell you what this actually looks like, because this is what I hear in my practice. Constantly, a client will come to me and [00:10:00] say, I don't know if I'm doing well. My manager says I'm fine, but I never get any kind of real feedback. I don't know what exceeding expectations would even look like.

I just keep working harder, hoping someone will tell me I'm on the right track. 

And then, and this is the kicker, they'll get blindsided by their performance review, or worse they get put on a pip. Separate research has actually found that 75% of millennials are unsure about their job performance or how to improve, and 62% felt completely blindsided by their evaluations. Oh and 60% believe their managers are unprepared to give constructive feedback.

This is a leadership failure, full stop, and here's where it gets even worse. Managers spend only 13% of their time developing people, 13%. The rest is meetings, reports, putting out fires, managing up all the other bullshit that they have to deal with. [00:11:00] Actually coaching and developing the people they're responsible for ends up being an afterthought.

Now let's connect this back to the five Cs. This is culture and convictions, working together to destroy people. The culture piece is pretty obvious. I mean, when 77% of HR leaders say traditional performance reviews don't accurately capture day-to-day performance, but we keep using them anyway, that tells you something about the culture.

When trust in managers drops 17 points in two years. That also tells you something when managers aren't effective, but nothing changes. That's culture. but the convictions piece is a bit more insidious.

Convictions are the beliefs that you hold about yourself, your work, and your worth. And when you're operating in a system where nobody can define what good looks like, you start to believe that the problem is you. You start thinking, Hey, maybe I'm not cut out for this. Maybe I don't have what it takes. maybe [00:12:00] everyone else here understands what's going on and I'm just missing something. But that's not what's happening. What's happening is you're in a system where the people in charge don't know how to define success.

They don't spend time developing you and have lost your trust. That's not a you problem, that's a them problem. And for younger workers specifically, this hits a little different. So Gen Z came into the workforce. During the pandemic, right? They were launching their careers from their bedrooms, and now they're being told that they need to prove themselves in offices using standards that nobody can articulate.

research shows that they value honesty and integrity and a manager five times more than expertise. They want empathetic managers, not just experienced ones. And what are they getting? Leaders who don't know what good looks like and don't have time to figure it out with them.

Here's what this data tells me. The leadership pipeline is broken, which I already knew. We're promoting people into management without [00:13:00] training them, expecting them to figure it out, and then wondering why engagement is collapsing. External hires into leadership roles are 61% more likely to fail within 18 months compared to internal promotions, but we keep doing it because it's faster than developing our own people.

And all of this, the lack of clarity, the broken feedback loops, the disengaged managers, the eroding trust. All of this creates the conditions where your capacity gets depleted. Because capacity isn't just about how much you can handle. It's about whether you have the support, development and resources to actually grow.

And right now it's very clear that people don't. All right. Let's get into the third revelation, the gaslighting economy. Gallup did something interesting in their research. So they asked open-ended questions and then analyzed the responses from those qualitative responses. now when employees were asked [00:14:00] what would help them feel more cared about at work, here's what one person said, and I want you to really hear this. They said, quote, if I felt listened to. If we have a complaint, the response is always remember why you're here, or have more grace or practice gratitude, which is not solving the problem and making us feel bad for even bringing something up that we need work on.

I'm gonna repeat that again. Remember why you're here. Have more grace and practice gratitude friend. That's gaslighting when you raise a legitimate concern about workload or unclear expectations or lack of support, and the response is to suggest that you need to adjust your attitude or be more grateful, that's the organization telling you the problem is your perception, not their practices.

And this is everywhere. I see it constantly, and hell, I experienced it myself a few years [00:15:00] ago. Organizations are offering meditation apps and mental health days while simultaneously creating the conditions that are destroying people's mental health. They're putting out employee engagement surveys and then telling people who express dissatisfaction to focus on the positive.

Now here's some more data that shows just how bad this really is. So when employees were asked, what would help them feel cared about? 34% said supportive relationships, communication, and respect, not ping pong tables or pizza parties.

Respect being listened to, having their concerns taken seriously, and the organization's response to declining engagement and increasing burnout. Return to office mandates. Now, I wanna be clear, I'm not inherently against office work. Some people thrive in offices, some work genuinely is better in person and actually needs to happen in [00:16:00] person.

That's perfectly fine. What I'm against is using RTO mandates as a blunt instrument while calling it culture building. And the data on this is pretty damning. A 2023 UNI based survey found that 42% of employers who mandated return to office experienced higher than normal turnover, and 29% had a harder time recruiting.

Research from MIT shows that RTO mandates damage employee engagement and increased attrition, especially among high performers and people with caregiving responsibilities. And here's the really dark part. One in four executives and 18% of HR leaders admitted that they hoped employees would quit. When RTO policies were implemented, they were literally using RTO as a stealth layoff strategy while talking about collaboration and innovation,

meanwhile, 64% of employees say they would quit or start looking for a new job if forced back to full-time. And 76% of companies [00:17:00] report that allowing remote work actually increases employee retention. Okay, cool. So we know what works, we just don't want to do it. Now let me bring this home again to the five Cs, the choices people are making.

High turnover, short tenure, side hustles, disengagement. These aren't reflective of an individual's character. These are rational responses to impossible conditions when 82% of employees are at risk of burnout, and the organizational response is practice gratitude. What choice do you even have when you raise concerns and get told to have more grace?

What choice do you really have? When your capacity is depleted because you are getting no development, no clarity, and no real support, what choice do you have? Now, here's another stat that really crystallized this for me.

Research from Carlo found that employees who feel a sense of [00:18:00] belonging experience 30% workplace stress versus 56%. For those who don't. 55% report burnout versus 78%. Job satisfaction is 77% versus 28%. Belonging cuts burnout nearly in half, but you can't belong to an organization that gaslights you. You can't feel cared about when your concerns are met with.

Be grateful you have a job. You can't build convictions about your own worth when the system is designed to make you question yourself. and here's what makes me angriest about all of this. Organizations have the data. They know what works. Communication, clarity, care development, respect, belonging. These aren't mysterious, complicated, or even expensive kind of interventions.

They're basic management practices that we've known about for decades, but they require [00:19:00] something Organizations don't want to give. Actual commitment to treating people like humans instead of resources. So I'm gonna bring this home. If you're listening to this and feeling validated, good, you should, because the data confirms what you've been experiencing.

This isn't you. The conditions have deteriorated. The culture has regressed, and organizations are responding to systemic failures by suggesting that you need to be more grateful. But I also want to give you something practical to take from this because you know, I'm all about finding agency when it feels like there is none.

So first, get clear on what you can control versus what you can't. You can't fix your organization's broken leadership pipeline unless you're in that kind of role. You probably can't single handedly restore role clarity or rebuild trust and management. Those are conditions and culture issues that are probably way above your pay grade.

But what you can [00:20:00] control is how you advocate for yourself, the questions you ask, the boundaries you set, and the investments that you make in your own development when your organization won't. Second, I want you to use this data to reality. Check your convictions. If you are wondering, am I not cut out for this?

Go back to these numbers. Four out of five, people don't know what exceptional performance looks like. 75% of millennials are unsure how to improve. 62% felt blindsided by reviews. The system is what's broken. You are not.

Third, make informed choices. If you're in an organization that responds to concerns with have more grace or be more grateful, you now know that that's gaslighting. If you're experiencing the engagement collapse that 8 million other people are experiencing, you now know it's systemic. It can't just be you when it's 8 million other people, and you can [00:21:00] make choices based on that reality instead of assuming that you are the problem.

And finally, remember that belonging matters. If you can't find it at work, build it outside of work. And honestly, even if you can find it at work, still build it outside of work. Find your people. Find the communities, the networks, and the spaces where you feel seen, heard, and valued. The data is super clear on what works.

Clarity, communication, development, care, and respect. If your organization is willing to do those things, you might be able to make it work. If they're not, then your job is to protect yourself and make choices that serve your long-term wellbeing, not their short-term productivity goals. Alright, that's what I've got for you today.

I know it was very stat heavy, but I just couldn't. Not share all [00:22:00] of that data. So if this resonated, I want you to send it to someone who needs to hear it. And if you wanna dig deeper into any of this, you know where to find me. You can DM me on Instagram or on TikTok, send me an email, whatever. Um, I would love to nerd out with you about this data.

Now be sure to take care of yourselves out there because as we can see, it's quite bonkers. And remember, you are not the problem, the conditions are. I'll see you next time.