Employee engagement held steady at 31% for the first half of 2026, while 18% of workers were actively disengaged, according to a recent report from Gallup.
Gallup defines employee engagement as “employees’ involvement in and enthusiasm for their work and workplace.” Employee engagement reached 36% in 2020, and then fell to 31% in 2024 where it’s stayed through the first half of 2026, resulting in 8 million fewer engaged employees since 2020.
There’s a substantial monetary cost to low engagement: unengaged or actively disengaged employees cost the economy about $2 trillion annually in lost workplace productivity. Since 2020, younger workers, hybrid workers, and managers have seen the sharpest declines.
Despite the broader decline in employee engagement, one aspect of workplace engagement has improved recently. In the first half of 2026, 49% of employees “strongly agreed” that they know what’s expected of them at work, up two percentage points.
Gallup says this is “welcome news” after 2025, when the largest five-year declines in engagement were in employees’ clarity of expectations and feeling cared about at work.
Gallup explains: “Clarity of expectations is foundational to building highly engaged teams. Without it, employees lack a shared standard for success. The recent increase moves in the right direction, but employee clarity remains well below the 61% peak in 2015.”
But “slight declines in the percentage of employees who feel their opinions count and who feel connected to their organization’s purpose offset the recent gain in clear expectations.” This highlights a continuing problem of detachment, showing that while clarity can improve task execution, engagement also requires employees to believe their contribution matters, their opinions count, and their work connects to a larger purpose.
Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash
