The Real Reason Employee Engagement Keeps Falling
Gallup’s newest State of the Global Workplace report landed with a number that should stop every executive mid-scroll: just 20% of employees worldwide are engaged at work, the lowest reading since 2020. The cost of all that checked-out capacity? Roughly $10 trillion a year in lost productivity, about 9% of global GDP.
Here’s what troubles me most about that number. It keeps falling while organizations spend more than ever on employee engagement. More surveys, more perks, more recognition platforms, more wellness apps.
When the investment goes up and the outcome goes down, the problem usually isn’t effort. It’s diagnosis.
After two decades of working with leaders, first at McKinsey and now through Happiness Squad, I’ve reached a conclusion that my friend Tony Martignetti arrived at from a completely different direction. Tony spent 25 years as a biotech finance and strategy executive before walking out of a boardroom to change how we lead. What we both landed on: most disengaged employees don’t have a motivation problem. They have an identity problem.
Why Disengaged Employees Are Actually Dis-Identified
Think about how we hire. We recruit a whole human being, someone with a full life outside of work, a range of interests, and years of hard-won experience that never made it onto their resume. Then we hand them a job description that asks for roughly 40% of who they are.
The other 60% doesn’t disappear. As Tony put it in our conversation:
Brilliance rarely disappears. It goes dormant. It gets shelved, because the environment only ever asks for a narrow part of who someone is.”
We’re hired for our titles, and then we perform the title. The finance leader plays “analytical.” The operations chief plays “enforcer.” Tony’s example is the finance executive who assumes being analytical is the whole job, when the role now asks for storytelling, connecting, and creativity too. The title is the costume, and most of us never take it off.
Now scale that across your org chart. The result is what I’d call structural disengagement: a workplace culture that pays for whole people and uses fragments of them. No pizza party fixes that.
I said this to Tony during our conversation, and I stand by how blunt it sounds:
There are so many people who go through their days at best numb, at worst completely stressed. They’re not alive. They are living, but they might as well be zombies walking.”
The felt experience on the inside is one Tony names better than anyone: outwardly successful but inwardly numb. An earlier guest of mine called it being miserably successful. Living, but not alive.
Burnout, Boreout, and the Diagnosis Most Leaders Miss
If disengagement has more than one root, then treating it starts with telling the roots apart.
Three distinct conditions get lumped together under “checked out.”
Burnout: Is an overload problem. Too much on the plate, for too long, with too little recovery. You’ll see triage behavior, where everything is urgent and nothing is thoughtful. The fix is to change the load, not to coach the person. Burnout is a systems problem, and no amount of resilience training makes up for a plate that keeps getting fuller.
Boreout: Is the quieter version, and it is the one engagement dashboards almost never catch. The person is still performing. Still hitting the numbers. The spark is simply gone. Because the output looks fine, no alarm ever rings. This is where employee disengagement hides in plain sight, and it is a signal about identity rather than effort.
The identity gap: Sits underneath both. The work has drifted so far from what makes this person feel alive that they leave most of who they are at home before the day even begins.
One more diagnostic lens, which Gallup’s data makes urgent: check your managers. Manager engagement fell from 30% to 22% in just two years, and disengaged managers pass that straight down to everyone who reports to them. It’s why re-engaging middle managers may be the highest-leverage move in the entire engagement conversation.
Rebuilding Employee Motivation Without a Single Perk
Here’s the liberating part. If disengagement is an identity problem, the remedy isn’t expensive. It’s conversational. Employee motivation isn’t something you install. It’s something you uncover, because it was always attached to the parts of the person the job stopped asking for.
Three questions, drawn from our conversation, that I’d put in every leader’s one-on-one rotation:
→ “When did you last feel most alive?” Not just at work, anywhere. The answer points straight at the capability nobody is using.
→ “What do you do on autopilot that could be done differently?” Autopilot is where shelved strengths, and shelved thinking, tend to hide.
→ “What’s missing in your work?” Deliberately open, so the unexpected answer has room to arrive.
One more swap for your next team meeting: replace “What’s your status?” with “What surprised you this week?” Change the question and you change what people scan their week for. You’ll also need enough psychological safety that people trust you with a real answer, which is precisely why these questions can’t be delegated to a survey.
The Evidence: Job Crafting and the Performance Case
If this sounds soft, the research says otherwise. Jane Dutton and Amy Wrzesniewski’s work at Michigan Ross, roughly 25 years of it, shows that job crafting, giving people agency to reshape their tasks, their relationships, and the meaning of their work, is one of the most robust interventions we have for building cultures where people perform and thrive. The findings hold from janitors to surgeons.
I’ve watched it work at close range. At a thousand-person manufacturing site, a veteran foreman left early every Thursday to coach a kids’ baseball team. Not his own kids, who were grown. He simply loved developing people. So the plant asked a question nobody had thought to ask in his twenty years there: what if you coached here? He helped design an onboarding-coach role for himself. New-hire attrition dropped. A man who had been quietly running on autopilot came alive using a strength the company had employed for two decades without ever once requesting it.
That’s the pattern Tony has now formalized in what he calls the Illumination Framework. Discover what’s been sidelined, distill how it serves your current purpose, design the environment around it, deliver it daily. The framework is his. The conviction is one we share completely: nobody had to manufacture meaningful work for that foreman. It was already in the building, waiting for permission.
What This Means for Workplace Culture in the AI Era
There’s a reason this conversation is urgent in 2026 specifically. As AI absorbs the routine layer of work, the abilities that appreciate in value are the most human ones. Integration across domains, meaning-making, and the skill Tony calls the ultimate game changer: asking great questions.
There is a trap, though. Teams are using AI to generate reports, decks, and analysis at unprecedented volume, and middle managers are drowning in the resulting ghostwork. “It’s becoming inefficient to have efficiencies,” Tony told me, a line every CFO should sit with. Efficiency that erodes meaning isn’t efficiency. It’s deferred disengagement, arriving on next year’s Gallup chart.
The leaders who get this right will treat AI as the forcing function to redesign roles around what makes humans irreplaceable, which happens to be the same thing that makes them feel alive.
Enrichment Is the New Engagement
The deepest reframe from our conversation fits in six words: don’t just engage them, enrich them.
Engagement asks how we get more from people. Enrichment asks how we leave people better than we found them. Bob Chapman’s line in Everybody Matters is the moral floor here. Everyone on your payroll is somebody’s child. Commercially, enrichment is simply the compounding version of engagement, because people give their discretionary brilliance to the places that grow them.
This is the part I keep coming back to:
“We are creating worlds through the words we use, every minute. We can choose to create worlds of flourishing, or we can choose to create worlds of suffering.”
Where you can start this week:
→ Run the two-list practice: List the decisions only you can make, then the ones you merely prefer to make. Hand one from the second list to a team member, along with the freedom to do it their own way. You reclaim focus. They receive a spark.
→ Name one unclaimed capability: In someone on your team. Most people can’t see their own hidden brilliance. Naming it is permission.
→ Ask one of the three discovery questions: In your next one-on-one, and listen for the answer you didn’t expect.
A workplace culture that asks for whole people doesn’t just feel better. It out-learns, out-adapts, and outperforms the ones running on fragments. In a 20%-engaged world, that is about as close to a free competitive edge as you will find.
If you want to go deeper, my full conversation with Tony Martignetti, on the Flourishing Edge podcast, covers the diagnostics, the questions, and the practices in detail.
Learn more about Tony Martignetti on LinkedIn.
Listen to the podcast with Ashish and Tony Martignetti. above, You can also listen on Apple Podcasts.
Access and subscribe to all of the episodes of the Flourishing Edge Podcast here.
Make Flourishing Your Competitive Edge.
