Episode #47: 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.

Gallup’s latest employee engagement data landed last week, and while the headlines focused on a five-point drop since 2020, the real story is far more alarming.

We’re not experiencing a post-pandemic adjustment or a temporary dip. We’re witnessing systemic collapse in real time.

We’ve erased a decade of steady improvement and landed back at 2014 levels. But the aggregate numbers only tell part of the story. When you examine who’s bearing the brunt of this decline, what specific workplace conditions are deteriorating, and how organizations are responding, a pattern emerges that should concern every leader, HR professional, and employee in America.

This isn’t about workers being less committed or a generational shift in values. This is about organizations systematically dismantling the very practices that drove engagement to its peak, then blaming employees for the predictable results.

The Great Regression: How We Unlearned What Worked

The 2020 Paradox

At first glance, 2020 seems like an unlikely year for peak employee engagement. A global pandemic forced organizations into crisis mode, upending decades of workplace norms overnight. Yet engagement reached its highest point in over a decade precisely because of how organizations responded to that crisis.

When survival was on the line, companies did what actually drives engagement:

Communicated constantly and transparently about changing conditions
Clarified priorities relentlessly as circumstances shifted
Demonstrated care for employees as humans through health checks, flexibility, and genuine concern
Abandoned pretense and acknowledged uncertainty instead of projecting false confidence
Granted flexibility by necessity, not as a perk but as a survival mechanism

But it wasn’t strategic culture change. It was crisis management.

And the moment organizations felt the crisis subsiding, they attempted to revert to “normal,” except they didn’t return to baseline. They regressed below it.

The Current Landscape: A Public Health Crisis

Today’s “normal” is characterized by escalating dysfunction:

72% of U.S. employees face moderate to very high workplace stress
82% of employees are at risk of burnout
120,000 deaths annually are attributed to chronic workplace stress in the United States
$300 billion in annual economic costs stem from workplace stress

These aren’t abstract statistics about job satisfaction. This is a documented public health emergency that organizations are actively perpetuating while offering meditation apps as solutions.

The Generational Impact: Canaries in the Coal Mine

Younger workers are often labeled as “less engaged.” But they’re experiencing accelerated deterioration in conditions that should concern everyone.

For Gen Z and younger millennials:

8-9 point drop in overall engagement
13-point decline in feeling cared about at work
11-point decrease in opportunities to learn and grow
Average tenure of 1.1 years in first five career years (vs. 2.9 for Boomers)

The Entry-Level Opportunity Collapse:

Since January 2024, job postings requiring 0-2 years experience have declined:

29% overall decrease in entry-level opportunities
35% drop in junior tech roles
25% decline in logistics positions
24% reduction in finance entry points

This generation faces a toxic combination. They’re told they need experience for entry-level roles while those roles vanish into thin air. They’re entering organizations that abandoned the engagement practices proven effective in 2020. And they’re shouldering financial insecurity that makes career building nearly impossible.

This is a rational response to conditions previous generations never faced at career entry.

The Conditions

In my work with burned-out professionals, I use a framework called the 5 Cs Driving Burnout. The first C, Conditions, refers to the structural, systemic realities of your workplace that exist before you even arrive.

Right now, Conditions are deteriorating across every measurable dimension:

Role Clarity: Down 9 points since 2020. When asked what would help clarify expectations, 35% of employees said simply “better communication.” Organizations can’t even clearly articulate what they want from people.

The Flexibility Trap: While 76% of remote/hybrid workers report better work-life balance, the boundaries that protect that balance have collapsed:

81% check email outside work hours
63% check email on weekends
34% check email on vacation
48% regularly work outside scheduled hours

Organizations granted flexibility without creating the structures to sustain it, then blamed employees for failing to maintain boundaries while silently expecting always-on availability.

The Learning Gap: Opportunities for development, which are critical for building the Capacity that prevents burnout, have evaporated precisely when younger workers need them most. The 11-point drop in “opportunities to learn and grow” for Gen Z tells a story of organizations abandoning their responsibility to develop people while still expecting high performance.

The Leadership Void: When Nobody Knows What “Good” Looks Like

The Clarity Crisis

Perhaps the most damning finding in Gallup’s research is that less than one-third of leaders strongly agree they know what exceptional performance looks like in their role. For managers and individual contributors, that number drops to approximately one in five.

Let that sink in. Four out of five people in organizations cannot articulate what exceptional performance actually entails. This creates an impossible situation:

How do you set meaningful goals without clear performance definitions?
How do you develop people toward undefined standards?
How do you provide useful feedback when success itself is ambiguous?
How do employees build conviction in their own abilities when the bar keeps moving?

You can’t. And the data shows the consequences.

The Trust Collapse

Trust in managers plummeted from 46% in 2022 to 29% in 2024—a 17-point drop in just two years.

And additional research compounds the problem:

Only 26% of organizations report managers are “very or extremely effective” at enabling team performance
Managers spend merely 13% of their time actually developing people
Only 31% of managers themselves are engaged
75% of millennials remain unsure about their performance or improvement areas
62% felt blindsided by performance evaluations
60% believe their managers are unprepared to provide constructive feedback
77% of HR leaders acknowledge traditional performance reviews don’t capture actual performance

We have disengaged managers attempting to engage disengaged employees using systems that HR leaders admit don’t work, measuring against standards that leaders themselves can’t define.

Make it make sense.

The Performance Management Breakdown

In my coaching practice, this manifests constantly. High performers tell me variations of the same story:

“My manager says I’m doing fine, but I never get real feedback. I don’t know what exceeding expectations would look like. I keep working harder, hoping someone will tell me I’m on track. Then my review comes, and either I’m blindsided by criticism or given vague praise that doesn’t help me understand how to advance.”

This is more than just a communication problem between individual managers and employees. It’s systemic leadership failure.

The pipeline is broken at every level:

External leadership hires are 61% more likely to fail within 18 months compared to internal promotions. Yet organizations continue external hiring because it’s faster than developing internal talent
People are promoted into management without training and new managers are expected to “figure it out.” And no clear definitions of success exist for them to even model.
They spend 13% of time on development because the other 87% goes to meetings, reports, and managing up.

Culture and Convictions in Collision

This leadership void operates through two of the 5 Cs simultaneously:

Culture: When 77% of HR leaders know performance systems don’t work but organizations keep using them anyway, that’s culture. When trust collapses 17 points in two years with no corrective action, that’s culture. When managers remain ineffective without consequences or support, that’s culture.

Convictions: These are the beliefs you hold about yourself, your work, and your worth. When you operate in systems where “good” is undefinable and standards are opaque, you internalize failure. You begin believing:

“Maybe I’m not cut out for this.”
“Maybe I don’t have what it takes.”
“Maybe everyone else understands the unspoken rules and I’m missing something.”

When the reality is that you’re functioning in a system where the people in charge don’t know how to define success, don’t allocate time to develop you, and have lost your trust.

For younger workers, this hits with particular force. They entered the workforce during a pandemic, launched careers from bedrooms, and now face demands to prove themselves using standards nobody can articulate.

Research shows Gen Z values honesty and integrity in managers five times more than expertise. They want empathetic leadership, not just credentials. Instead, they’re getting leaders who can’t define excellence and don’t have time to figure it out with them.

And that results in depleted Capacity. Capacity isn’t just about workload tolerance. It’s about whether you have the support, development, and resources to grow.

So when only 13% of manager time goes to development and nobody can define what growth actually looks like, capacity erodes to nothing.

The Gaslighting Economy

The Response That Reveals Everything

Gallup’s qualitative research asked employees an open-ended question: What would help you feel more cared about at work?

One response encapsulates the current organizational approach perfectly:

“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 worked on.”

This is gaslighting… organizational deflection that reframes legitimate systemic concerns as individual attitude problems.

When you raise issues about workload, unclear expectations, or inadequate support, and the response suggests you need to adjust your perception or practice gratitude, the organization is explicitly telling you that the problem isn’t their practices. It’s your attitude.

The Disconnect Between Need and Response

When employees articulated what would actually help them feel cared about:

34% said supportive relationships, communication, and respect
23% mentioned fair compensation and security
11% cited healthy work environment and balance

Note what’s absent: ping pong tables, pizza parties, and meditation apps.

Employees are asking for fundamental respect. They want to be heard, to have concerns addressed, and to receive fair compensation for work performed.

Organizational responses to declining engagement and escalating burnout:

Return-to-office mandates (often punitive)
Wellness apps (addressing symptoms, not causes)
“Gratitude” initiatives (reframing problems as perception issues)
Employee engagement surveys (collecting data while ignoring results)

See the disconnect?

The RTO Reality

I’m not categorically opposed to office work. Some people thrive in office environments. Some collaboration genuinely benefits from physical proximity. But let’s examine how RTO is actually being deployed:

The Data:

42% of employers mandating RTO experienced higher than normal turnover
29% faced increased recruiting difficulties
64% of employees would quit or job search if forced back full-time
76% of companies report remote work actually increases retention
MIT research shows RTO mandates damage engagement and increase attrition, especially among high performers and caregivers

The Admission:

25% of executives admitted hoping employees would quit when implementing RTO policies
18% of HR leaders shared the same hope

RTO is being weaponized as stealth layoffs while being marketed as culture-building.

Organizations know what works for engagement and retention. They’re just choosing not to do it.

The 5 Cs Come Together

The Choices people are making—high turnover, brief tenure, side hustles, disengagement—aren’t character defects. They’re rational responses to impossible Conditions.

When 82% of employees risk burnout and organizational response is “practice gratitude,” what choice remains?

When you raise concerns and receive “have more grace,” what choice do you have?

When your Capacity depletes due to absent development, unclear expectations, and inadequate support, what choice exists?

Research from Cariloop illuminates what actually matters. And that’s a sense of belonging.

Employees with a sense of belonging experience:

30% workplace stress (vs. 56% without belonging)
55% burnout rate (vs. 78%)
77% job satisfaction (vs. 28%)

Belonging cuts burnout nearly in half. But you cannot belong to an organization that gaslights you. You cannot feel cared about when concerns are met with “be grateful you have a job.” You cannot build Convictions about your worth when systems are designed to make you question yourself.

Organizations possess the data. They know what drives engagement: communication, clarity, development, respect, belonging.

These aren’t mysterious, complex, or prohibitively expensive interventions. They’re fundamental management practices we’ve understood for decades.

They require one thing organizations resist providing. And that’s genuine commitment to treating people as humans rather than resources to be optimized.

But What Can You Actually Do About This?

Validate Your Experience

If you’re feeling validated by this data, you should. The numbers confirm what you’ve been experiencing… this isn’t you.

Conditions have deteriorated, culture has regressed, and organizations are responding to systemic failures by suggesting you need more gratitude.

Clarify Control

Get precise about what you can control versus what you cannot.

You cannot:

Fix your organization’s broken leadership pipeline
Single-handedly restore role clarity
Rebuild trust in management
Change performance management systems

These are Conditions and Culture issues operating above your pay grade.

You can:

Advocate for yourself strategically
Ask clarifying questions that expose gaps
Set and maintain boundaries
Invest in your own development when organizations won’t
Document what’s happening
Build external networks and skills

Reality-Check Your Convictions

When questioning “Am I not cut out for this?” return to these numbers:

4 out of 5 people don’t know what exceptional performance looks like
75% of millennials are unsure how to improve
62% felt blindsided by performance reviews
13-point drop in feeling cared about for younger workers
11-point decline in development opportunities

The system is broken. You are not.

Make Informed Choices

You now have language and data to identify gaslighting when it occurs:

If your organization responds to concerns with “have more grace,” that’s gaslighting.
If you’re experiencing engagement collapse affecting 8 million others, it’s systemic, not personal.
If conditions match what this data describes, make choices based on that reality.

Build Belonging Wherever You Find It

Belonging matters profoundly; it cuts burnout nearly in half.

If you can’t find it at work, build it elsewhere. Find your people. Locate communities, networks, and spaces where you feel seen, heard, and valued.

The data clarifies what works: clarity, communication, development, care, and respect. If your organization demonstrates willingness to implement these practices, you might make it work. If they don’t, your job becomes protecting yourself and making choices that serve your long-term wellbeing rather than their short-term productivity goals.

The Choice Organizations Face

We learned something crucial in 2020: when organizations communicate clearly, demonstrate care, provide flexibility, and treat people as humans facing a crisis together, engagement soars. We proved these practices work.

Then we collectively decided to unlearn it all.

The engagement decline from 36% to 31% is actually pretty predictable. Organizations abandoned practices that drove peak engagement, reverted to broken systems everyone knows don’t work, and blamed employees for the deterioration.

Eight million workers have checked out. They’re not lazy, entitled, or ungrateful. They’re responding rationally to conditions that are literally making them sick.

Now, organizations face a choice: acknowledge that conditions, culture, and leadership have failed, then commit to the basic practices that actually work. Or continue blaming workers for systemic failures while wondering why engagement keeps falling.

The data has spoken. The question is whether anyone’s listening.

If you’re navigating these conditions and need support understanding what you can control, change, or walk away from, that’s exactly the work I do with clients. You’re not the problem. The conditions are. Let’s figure out your next move together.

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I’m Tara Kermiet — leadership coach, burnout strategist, and host of The Balanced Badass Podcast®. I help high-achievers and corporate leaders design careers that are successful and sustainable.

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Episode #47: The Great Unraveling: Employee Engagement Just Hit a 10-Year Low