The Engagement Crisis Impacting Young Workers
Episode 511 | Author: Emilie Aries
As a leader, how can you tackle employee disengagement?
Employee engagement is in crisis, and it’s taking a serious toll on businesses and their workers. From uninterested to actively working against the organization’s goals, almost 70% of the American workforce is currently disengaged.
“The involvement and enthusiasm that employees have for their work and workplace.” That’s how Gallup, the leading workplace analytics and advisory firm, defines employee engagement, and it's their long-term global research that gives us this daunting statistic. The issue is at play across all industries and sectors, so today I’m breaking down Gallup’s Q12 engagement survey from the perspective of the manager or leader: How can we cultivate engagement in our teams?
Disengaged employees are rocking the boat
Gallup’s latest research identifies a 10-year low (between 2014 and 2024) in employee engagement in the U.S.. This isn’t great for employees, who have to drag themselves to their workplaces each day and slog through work that doesn’t inspire them. But it also has a big impact on the bottom line. More engagement at work is correlated with fewer mistakes, less turnover and absenteeism, higher customer loyalty, and a whopping 25% higher profit margin. When only 31% of your workers are engaged, that’s a big ROI red flag.
I liken it to being on a rowing team. Gallup’s numbers mean that on your 10-person crew, only three are actively rowing toward the finish line. That leaves seven people scrolling Instagram—or Indeed 😬.
Maybe, if your three engaged workers are absolute rockstars, this could run for a while. But we’re not done. Gallup also found that 17% of the American workforce is “actively disengaged”, which means they aren’t quietly despondent but vocally negative and cynical, perhaps even engaging others in their discontent. This means up to two people in your boat are actively rowing in the wrong direction. Face it: Your crew isn’t getting the gold.
Generational differences in employee engagement
This Gallup article highlights a dramatic engagement decline in the younger workforce, especially elder millennials or those born between 1980 and 1988. Their engagement dropped from 39% in 2020 to 32% in 2024. The number of folks actively disengaged also rose five points, from 12 to 17%. Gen Z employees, the freshest faces in the workforce, are also losing interest. Engaged workers in their bracket dipped from 40 to 35%.
Interestingly, Boomers have become more engaged since 2020. This is one factor that raises the question of what additional circumstances beyond workplace environment could be causing this mass mental (and sometimes physical) decline.
Gallup’s Q12 survey gauges the basic needs we require to feel engaged at work, but these disparate generational numbers make me wonder if the younger workers are the ones most in touch with everything else in our world today that stands in the way of wholeheartedly sinking our teeth into our work. Things like the fact that the “American Dream” is slipping away, child care is brutally inadequate, and our ability to make a living that will actually support our families is declining. Other studies show the chronic stress, anxiety, and depression these truths incite. It’s very possible this isn’t just about the workplace.
The remote work factor
Another assumption I’ve seen recently is that the blame for the disengagement problem lies squarely with remote work. I recently gave a keynote about employee engagement to a company wrestling with a return to the office mandate whose senior leadership made it clear that they believed returning to the office was the answer to their engagement challenges. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Many workers reported sitting through their one-hour-each-way commute, just for the pleasure of sitting in front of a Zoom screen all day to meet with colleagues from other offices or who were working from home that day.
In-person work can absolutely help employees feel more connected to the big picture, but organizations need clear expectations and assurances before they drag everyone out of their loungewear and into a half-empty office.
This need for clear expectations takes us neatly into the Gallup Q12. Let’s break it down.
A workplace hierarchy of needs
For their annual workplace survey, Gallup puts forth a hierarchy of engagement model, sort of like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which they call the Q12. Their thoughtfully ordered series of questions that gauge employee engagement can (and must) be leveraged by leaders as a diagnostic tool to make sure we’re giving our teams both the freedom and structure they need to succeed.
Fulfill their foundational needs
Do I know what’s expected of me at work?
Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my job well?
The first two questions in the Q12 are about essentials. If the answer to either of these is “no”, it doesn’t matter how many positives employees report throughout the rest of the survey. As leaders, we must make our expectations clear to our teams and give them the tools they need to meet them.
Champion individual contribution
Is there someone at work who encourages my development?
Does my supervisor, or someone at work seem to care about me as a person?
In the last 7 days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work?
Do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
Leaders can’t just scatter their team members like seeds across the project landscape. We must consider individual skills and interests and delegate with care. The only way to do this successfully is to get to know our employees as people. And in order to foster their confidence in their skillsets, we need to recognize their achievements whenever they occur—not just at the annual performance review.
Take teamwork up a notch
Do I have a best friend at work?
Are my coworkers committed to doing quality work?
Does my organization’s mission/purpose make my job feel important?
Do my opinions seem to count at work?
Sure, leaders can’t play matchmaker, but they can certainly facilitate social interaction. As a manager, consider how you’re connecting your workers to something bigger. How are you showing them that their opinions matter—remember, questionnaires only mean something if your team sees you addressing their feedback.
Encourage and guide their growth
In the last year, have I had opportunities to learn and grow?
In the last 6 months, has someone talked to me about my progress?
Much like praise, we need to be invested in our team members’ growth and development week by week, not just once a year. Getting to “yes” in this section starts with question 6 (giving them the opportunity to do what they do best) and then calls for regular check-ins, access to quality professional development resources, and regular conversations about what’s in store for them, on the current team and beyond.
If we start with clear expectations, perhaps we can begin to turn the tide of unsatisfied, understimulated, and disengaged employees, even if we can’t single-handedly restore the full promise of the American Dream.
I want to hear your thoughts on all this! What factors do you think are behind this drastic downturn in employee engagement? As a leader or manager yourself, how are you seeing your team engage with their work, or—if you’re experiencing the fall off firsthand—what is active disengagement looking like to you? Join the conversation in the Courage Community on Facebook or our group on LinkedIn.
Related Links From Today’s Episode:
Book Emilie to speak at your event
Episode 265, How to Set Clear Expectations As a Leader
Episode 376, How to Make Performance Reviews More Effective as a Manager
Episode 407, How to Delegate Without Feeling So Bad About It
Episode 452, Redefining Success: Women and the Fight for a Fair Economy
Episode 483, Can You Be Friends At Work?
Episode 489 How the Cost of Childcare Has Become a Workforce Issue
Gallup, U.S. Employee Engagement Sinks to 10-Year Low
Gallup 2025 State of the Global Workplace Report
Gallup, The Benefits of Employee Engagement
Gallup, The Q12 Employee Engagement Survey
LEVEL UP: a Leadership Accelerator for Women on the Rise
Learn to LEVEL UP your team-building and leadership skills:
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EMILIE: Hey, and welcome to the Bossed Up podcast, episode 511. I'm your host, Emilie Aries, the Founder and CEO of Bossed Up. And today I want to talk about the employee engagement crisis as it is particularly hitting the younger workers in the workforce right now.
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First, let's define our terms here, because employee engagement can mean lots of different things to different people. But I like the definition used by Gallup. Gallup, I think, is doing, frankly, the best global research on this topic. And so I cite their stuff often when I'm speaking about employee engagement. They define engagement as, quote, “the involvement and enthusiasm that employees have for their work and workplace”. And we know that workplaces with more engaged employees have a lot of benefits, not the least of which is 25% higher profit. When Gallup found, looking at all the different levels of employee engagement in their workplaces that they've surveyed. Surveying tens of millions of workers over the years, they found that the companies in the top quartile for engagement have a 25% higher profit margin than companies in the lowest quartile.
Those companies also experience less absenteeism, lower turnover, fewer mistakes and errors, higher customer loyalty, and higher reports overall for employee wellbeing. So it's good for the bottom line and it's good for the people on the team. If you've ever worked on an engaged team or led an engaged team as a manager, I always liken it to being in a rowboat. So let's say you're in a competitive rowing competition, right, and you're the coxswain at the top trying to keep the team rowing in the same direction at the same pace and trying to get to the finish line fastest. If you are the average American workplace right now, which has only 31% of the workforce engaged in the work that they're doing, then only 3 out of the 10 people rowing on your boat will be actively rowing in the correct direction. The majority will be sitting there, oars out of the water on their lap, maybe scrolling Facebook, or Instagram, or TikTok. Like that is the visual that I always bring up, because that's what it feels like to manage a team where only 31% are actively engaged.
Gallup recently found, just as of last year, that 17% of the American workforce is actively disengaged, which is not just disengaged. Actively disengaged means they openly dislike and talk about disliking their job. They're vocally negative, often absent. They might be gossips in the workplace. They might use cynical humor to frankly like, throw shade at their own workplace. And I liken that as being almost 2 out of your 10 folks on that boat rowing actively in the opposite direction that you're trying to go in. So imagine as a leader, as a manager of a team, how challenging that must be. If you've got 10 folks on the rowboat, three of them are rowing in the right direction, two of them are rowing in the wrong direction. And what does that leave five of them? Like pretty much 50% of your team just sitting there, coasting. That is not a great state of the workplace, and that is what we've seen.
The latest research found that employee engagement has sunk to a 10 year low as of 2024, with only 31% engaged at work. What's interesting in particular when you parse through the data is the differences among generations in the workplace. I'm going to read you a snippet from this great article I'll link to by Gallup in today's Show Notes they found, the most dramatic decline in engagement has occurred among younger generations, especially the older group of millennials born between 1980 and 1988. That would be me Elder Millennial reporting for disengagement duty. They go on to write, the percentage of engaged older millennials has declined by 7 points from 39% to 32%, while the percentage of actively disengaged older millennials has increased by 5 points from 12% to 17%. This means that older millennials have seen their engagement ratio plummet from 3.3 to 1.9, meaning for every actively disengaged employee, there are only slightly more than two engaged ones. Not a great ratio there.
The younger group of millennial and Gen Z employees born 1989 or later have experienced a five point decline in engagement from 40% to 35%, while their actively disengaged employees in that age group has increased by a point from 13 to 14%. The bottom line here is elder Millennials on down all the way through to the youngest children. Gen Zer’s in the workplace right now are the least engaged right now. Boomers, by contrast, have actually increased in their engagement since March of 2020, growing from 34 to 36%. So while boomers are getting more engaged, younger workers are getting less engaged. Now, part of me thinks that Gallup's not really asking the right questions here because they're just asking about their Q12 survey, which I'll talk about in a moment, which gauges the basic needs that we all need at work to feel engaged.
I can't help but wonder, as someone who's, like, witnessing an authoritarian takeover in my home country right now and watching democracy crumble before my very eyes, and generally watching just like unbelievable, unprecedented life events happen again and again and again as millennials who've lived through these unprecedented catastrophes pretty much every 5 to 10 years since we've graduated, I just can't help if our general malaise is part of a broader global disillusionment, right? Like maybe the youngest workers in the workplace are the most in touch with the fact that the American dream is slipping away as we know it, are most in touch with the child care affordability crisis as we know it, are most in touch with the reality that our ability to make a living is not as sound as our parents were at our age, and that is generally causing burnout, chronic stress, anxiety, depression. So I can't help but wonder if there's something bigger going on than what's just happening at work.
And yet when Gallup writes about this, they make the connection to what's happening in the workplace as well. That might just be compounding things. What's interesting is they describe this as, quote, “younger workers are progressively feeling more detached from their organizations”, which is ironic because they go on to write, quote, “this generation of workers especially, is looking for an employer with a purpose they can identify with”. And then they go on to suggest that maybe it has something to do with working remotely, because younger workers are somewhat more likely to be working in remote jobs and are increasingly more likely to be actively looking for new jobs.
I'm really curious to hear what you make of that, do you think employee disengagement among younger workers has something to do with remote work? Do you think it has something to do with the broader economic bag that we've been left holding thanks to our former generations? Do you think it has something to do with the political realities that are facing young people these days and that young people might be more in touch with their idealism and haven't yet gotten completely jaded with the state of the world and settled into that numbing malaise that I've been really struggling with lately, to be honest with you. Curious to hear your thoughts.
I'll tell you what. I gave a recent keynote on employee engagement in the workplace for a company that is currently struggling to navigate a return to office mandate. And it was really interesting because, I was giving this keynote around engagement, talking through the challenges that their workers faced and their leadership, quite frankly, their managers were facing, and senior leadership made it really clear to me in preparing for this talk that they felt like this had to do with being remote. People aren't working as hard because they're fully remote or they're, you know, dragging them back to the office. And the way that that return to office mandate has gone has been met with a lot of resistance. And I can imagine how challenging that must be. But what's really interesting is, is that going to drive engagement? Is that going to fix their engagement problem? I don't think so.
And here's why, Gallup acknowledges that, yes, if we are going to do a return to office mandate or if we're going to manage hybrid or remote teams, we have to be really clear about expectations. Particularly for young employees who need that kind of shoulder to shoulder learning through osmosis. They call it development and mentoring and they want to just feel connected to the larger organization. But the company I was working with, when I asked their teams what it felt like to go back to the office because they had no standards and no clear expectations and no systematic approach to return to office, they described driving an hour through traffic to get to the office, only to log on to Zoom and do all their meetings remote that day and not have any of the team members that they were meeting with that day in office with them.
That is a way to drive resentment and basically just the only benefit of returning to office in that context is you get to drive more, and who wants to do that? Who wants to increase their commute time for no benefit of in person collaboration? And so if we're going to make the connection to return to office, it's so important that we set clear expectations, have the same days per week to expect people in, so that we're driving shoulder to shoulder collaboration. There is benefit to being able to learn through osmosis and learn and collaborate and brainstorm together, but not if your return to office process is managed sort of willy nilly, right? So I'm curious to hear what you make of that and I don't think young people are like, help, let's all return to office so that I can feel more engaged in work. I do not think that's the pathway to success.
What it all boils down to for me is clarity. So when you look at the Gallup Q12 framework, this is their 12 question survey about employee engagement, they drive home this idea that there's a hierarchy of engagement, kind of like a Maslow's hierarchy of needs, that I strongly believe in. And this is, I would say, a series of questions that we as managers and leaders must ask ourselves if we are looking to drive engagement on our teams, particularly among the youngest workers in the workplace.
The first set of questions are around foundational needs. One, do I know what's expected of me at work? And two, do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my job well? If you are not crystal clear about your expectations of your workers, these foundational needs are not met. And if you are not crystal clear from your team members on what they need to be successful, then your foundational needs for your team have not been met. And you can't even bother with the rest of these questions until those first two foundational needs are met. I've got some past episodes on how managers and leaders can set really clear expectations that I'll be sure to link to in today's show notes for further details on that.
From there, once those foundational needs are met, everybody has individual contribution needs at work. Here are the four questions that align with that. And these are questions that we should ask our team members, which you can do through conversation or through a survey. But it's really a great way to get at the specific drivers of engagement. Here are the four questions around this. One, is there someone at work who encourages my development? Does my supervisor or someone at work seem to care about me as a person? In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise? Interestingly, like workers, I think it's something like 60% of workers say they haven't been praised or received any recognition at work in the last year, and yet Gallup found that it only really counts if it's high frequency praise and feedback. So the distinction between engaged workplaces and disengaged workplaces or less engaged workplaces, I should say, is whether people are getting high frequency praise and recognition for their work. So if you're not giving it annually, at the very least, you know, start there. But then if you can up that praise and just like really reinforcing feedback to quarterly, monthly, weekly, even better.
And then the final question in this arena is, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day? So as managers, we have to think about, do I have the right people in the right seat? Have I given them positive reinforcement about what they're doing well? Have I made it clear that I do care about them as a person? Meaning, am I asking about their life? Am I asking about what is meaningful to them? Am I not just talking to them when I need something from them? And finally, how am I encouraging their ongoing development? I'll tell you what, an annual performance review conversation is far from sufficient. This is about going the extra mile as a manager to make sure people know that their individual contribution and their individual skills and value matters for your company and for your team.
Now, once those needs have been met, the next level of driving engagement on your team has to do with teamwork. These are the four questions that Gallup asks in their Q12 framework around engagement to get at the teamwork questions. One, do I have a best friend at work? Interestingly, they found that if they ask, do you you have a friend at work? Everybody says yes. But, that if you ask the question, do I have a best friend at work? You get a really different array of answers. And that tells you with higher probability how engaged your team is going to be at work. I'm not saying we can necessarily change this, by the way. Like, as a manager, what can I do to drive best friendships at work, other than create space for them to happen organically and then get out of the way, right? So don't think you have to be some kind of matchmaker, but do know that social time free from work, you know, free from workplace expectations, creating time and space for people to build authentic relationships is a smart driver for your culture.
The other three questions here are, are my co-workers committed to doing quality work? Again, if they asked, are you committed to doing quality work? Everybody said yes. But if you ask if their co-workers are committed to doing quality work, you get a different answer there. You get at a sort of a judgment of the culture around excellence and standards of excellence that comes to the surface with that kind of a question. And finally, does our mission or purpose make my job feel important? And do my opinions seem to count at work? Those are things that leaders can directly affect. How am I using my leadership vision and communicating my leadership vision to connect their day to day individual contributions to something bigger, something more meaningful, something more purposeful. That is the art of leadership at play. Like making it clear to people why it is that we do what we do every day. The bigger why behind the what. And how you can connect individual performance to collective mission is so, so important.
And then how are you showing people that their opinions count at work? Don't take a survey if you're not going to loop back on it and do something about it, right? Like, don't solicit their opinions unless you're seriously going to consider implementing them and demonstrate how you're doing so. And finally, the last two questions at the highest sort of pinnacle on this engagement hierarchy that Gallup has relates to people's growth. Two questions here in the last year have I had opportunities to learn and grow? And in the last six months has someone talked to me about my progress? Again, an annual performance review or development conversation is insufficient. At least a few times a year we need to be showing our team members that we are invested in their growth, that we want them to be invested in their growth and that we're expecting them to invest in their growth so that we can meet them halfway and equip them with what they need to grow. That's where providing professional development resources is very groundbreaking.
Now here's the thing to remember. If your foundational needs are not met, if you have no clarity around your role and what's expected of you and what resources you have to work with to make that happen, none of this other stuff matters. So our leaders listening need to cue into the fact that you have to start with clear expectations, then those individual contribution needs, then the collective teamwork needs and then we can get at growth. If we do all of these things well as leaders, if we audit our own management practices to make sure we're meeting our team members' needs in this way, they are likely to perform at a much higher level for you, than if you aren't meeting these needs. Like that's what's going to drive team engagement.
And I would venture to guess and, and Gallup reinforces this that these needs are universal regardless of age, regardless of seniority, right? We're not like young people don't necessarily want ping pong tables. They want role clarity. They want to be fairly accredited for their work and compensated for their work. They want to be given opportunities to connect their individual contribution to a broader team goal and mission. And they want to grow. It's not rocket science. It's simple but not easy.
So I'm curious to hear from you. If you're a leader, who is managing teams, how are you ensuring that these needs are met? And how are you seeing your team engage with the work at hand? And if you're not seeing engagement on your team, what does that look like? What does active disengagement look like for you? And if you're interested in leveling up your leadership and management skills, or you are an aspiring first time manager who wants to get some skills under your belt to feel more confident in rising in the ranks to take on team leadership. We have a wait list available right now for our LEVEL UP leadership accelerator at bossedup.or/levelup that's bossedup.org/levelup and I'll include the link in today's show notes so you'll be the first to know when that program becomes available again. As always, let's keep the conversation going after the episode in the Bossed Up Coach Courage Community on Facebook or in our Bossed Up Group on LinkedIn. You'll find all those links and links to everything that I mentioned in today's episode,
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as well as a full transcript of today's episode at bossedup.org/episode511 that's bossedup.org/episode511 and until next time, let's keep bossin’ in pursuit of our purpose, and together let's lift as we climb.
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