Employee engagement has hit a 10-year low, and your systems are to blame
Global employee engagement has hit its lowest point in a decade. Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace report found that only 20% of workers worldwide feel engaged in their jobs, a drop that researchers are calling the Great Detachment. The financial cost is staggering. Gallup estimates the decline is draining approximately $10 trillion from the global economy each year in lost productivity.
Yet many organizations are still responding the same way they always have: another resilience program, another engagement survey, another pizza party.
Aoife O'Brien, author of Thriving Talent and founder of the Happier at Work platform, says that approach is exactly the problem.
"We tend to focus a lot of the time on fixing people," O'Brien said. "We're putting the onus on the individuals to become more engaged rather than considering the kind of conditions or environment that we've created for them to do their work."
The system, not the person
O'Brien's argument is a structural one. Disengagement, she says, isn't a reflection of individual attitude or effort. It's a signal that something in the organizational environment isn't working. The distinction matters, because the solution looks completely different depending on which lens you use.
"I like to think of it as a shift from the mindset that it's up to the individual, to thinking it's up to the leaders to create the conditions for people to do better work, to do their best work," she said.
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Her framework, called the Thriving Talent Framework, is built around four interconnected elements: psychological safety as the foundation, followed by three pillars covering workplace culture, employee drivers and motivations, and team capabilities. Leadership sits at the top of the model, not as an afterthought, but as the capstone that either enables or undermines everything beneath it.
The practical implications are significant. When asked why engagement numbers keep falling despite all the attention companies pay to the topic, O'Brien pointed to a disconnect between measurement and action.
"Companies measure engagement, but I don't think they are addressing it at the root cause," she said. "They focus on very surface level things to try and fix engagement without going a bit deeper to think about what might be causing disengagement."
Where to start: psychological safety
The starting point, O'Brien says, is one most organizations overlook: psychological safety. Without it, nothing else in the framework can take hold.
The concept, originally developed by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, describes a team climate in which people feel safe to speak up, challenge decisions, and admit mistakes without fear of punishment. O'Brien argues that most organizations either overestimate how much of it they have, or misunderstand what it actually looks like.
"There's the one extreme where everyone is nice to each other and there's no conflict, and we assume that because there's no conflict we have psychological safety," she said. "But that's actually the opposite of psychological safety."
She shared a telling example: a leader who asks their assistant to find a first-class flight to London for $200 the next day. The request is intentionally unrealistic. If the assistant simply says yes without pushing back, that silence is a warning sign, not a sign of loyalty.
"You know that you have psychological safety when people are pushing back, when they're challenging things," O'Brien said. "The problem when people are silent is we don't know that they're holding back because it's not visible."
To build psychological safety, O'Brien points to what she calls the four C's: clarity, consistency, curiosity and care. That last one, she acknowledges, can feel unfamiliar to leaders who were trained to focus entirely on results.
"We need to genuinely care about the people that we work with," she said. "When we genuinely care about their well being, their careers, their results, their progression, then that will come through."
This isn't more work. It's different work.
A common objection from leadership teams is that this kind of systems thinking sounds good in theory but adds yet another burden to an already overstretched organization. O'Brien sees it differently.
"For me, it's not adding more to the plate," she said. "It's just rethinking and reframing how we're doing what we're doing on a day to day basis."
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The shift she's describing is largely a change in mindset. Leaders already hold team meetings, already have one-on-ones, already make decisions about how work gets done. The question is whether those interactions are designed around extracting output, or around understanding what each person needs to do their best work.
That includes recognizing that what motivates one employee won't necessarily motivate the next. "We tend to assume that what motivates us as an individual must be what motivates you," O'Brien said. "And so we try and incentivize people with those types of motivators." The fix is simpler than most leaders expect: ask, listen, and create a shared language that makes it safe for people to articulate their own needs and strengths.
Where culture varies from team to team, O'Brien says senior leadership has a role to play in spotting the signs. Poor team results, complaints to HR, or burnout emerging over time can all point to a deeper problem worth investigating.
The business case leaders can't ignore
The argument for investing in employee experience isn't just moral. The numbers, O'Brien notes, make the case on their own: companies treating people as extractable resources will eventually hit a ceiling on innovation, trust, and the kind of discretionary effort that can't be mandated into existence.
According to a 2025 study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, burnout costs U.S. employers between $4,000 and $21,000 per employee per year, with the average 1,000-person organization losing over $5 million annually as a result.
"Creating an environment where people feel fulfilled through the work that they do should not need to be justified because people get better business results from a revenue and profitability perspective," O'Brien said. "But actually that is what happens if we shift our focus to this."
Her message for senior HR leaders is ultimately a simple one: stop trying to fix the people. Start examining the system they're operating in.
"Rather than thinking we need another resilience program or we need to drive engagement," she said, "take a step back and look at what kind of environment you have created for them to work in."
