A recent LinkedIn post by Ghassan Karian caught my eye – he questioned why, after years of investment in employee engagement programmes, Gallup’s global engagement figure remains so low.
It prompted a good discussion, and I can understand why. Gallup’s latest report puts global employee engagement at 20%. That’s a sobering headline for anyone working to make work better.
But it also raises a question I’ve explored for years, including in my books: what are we actually measuring when we measure employee engagement?
And what happens when we make the score the goal?
The same label can mean different things
Employee engagement sounds like something we should all understand. Yet different measures approach it in different ways.
Some focus on people’s energy and involvement in their work. Others explore the conditions that help them perform, or their willingness to recommend their employer and remain with the organisation.
These are related ideas, but they aren’t interchangeable.
The Utrecht Work Engagement Scale, for example, measures vigour, dedication and absorption: the psychological experience of being engaged in your work. Gallup’s Q12 explores workplace conditions such as clarity, recognition and opportunities to develop.
Someone might love the work they do but feel frustrated by the organisation they work for. They might recommend their employer because of its flexibility and benefits, while feeling little love for their day-to-day role.
So, before we ask whether an engagement score is good, we need to understand what it represents.
What definition sits behind it?
Which questions were asked?
How were the responses combined?
What threshold determines whether someone counts as “engaged”?
A percentage without that context can look far more straightforward than it really is.
We need to ask more of our benchmarks
This doesn’t mean engagement measurement is pointless. Good measures can help us spot patterns, track changes and identify areas that deserve attention. But a measure can be reliable and useful for a particular purpose without answering every question we have about work.
External benchmarks add another layer of complexity. Different populations, questions and scoring methods can produce figures that look comparable but tell us different things.
Even where the methodology is consistent, a global average gives us limited insight into what is happening in a particular organisation, team or role.
And low global engagement cannot, on its own, tell us whether a particular organisation’s engagement programme has worked. It certainly cannot establish that every manager is failing.
Benchmarks give us context but we still have to do the work of interpretation.
When the score becomes the goal
But to be honest, despite this backdrop, my bigger concern is always what happens when the results are in.
An organisation gets its engagement score. Leaders want it to improve. Managers are asked to produce action plans. People teams develop initiatives to address the lowest-scoring questions.
Everyone may be acting with the best intentions. But we can move remarkably quickly from a survey result to a solution, without really understanding the experience behind it.
Imagine employees score career development poorly.
The response might be a new career framework, more learning content or a campaign explaining the opportunities already available.
But what if the issue is that people have no time to learn? Or managers discourage internal moves because they cannot afford to lose someone? Or opportunities are available, but access depends on who you know?
Those are different problems and they need different responses.
The survey has given us somewhere to look, but it hasn’t yet told us what to change.
An average can hide a lot
A headline score also compresses many different experiences into one number.
An organisation can have an encouraging overall result while particular groups struggle. New starters may feel lost. Experienced employees may feel stuck. Managers may be trying to support their teams while dealing with conflicting priorities and unrealistic workloads.
Even the same answer can have different explanations.
Two people might say they don’t feel recognised. One wants useful feedback about their contribution. The other wants fair pay for responsibilities that have steadily increased.
If we respond to both with a recognition scheme, we may create more activity without improving either person’s experience.
This is why conversations, qualitative insight and people’s lived experiences matter alongside the numbers, and maybe matter even more than the numbers?
What would make work better?
For me, this is where employee experience becomes particularly useful.
It encourages us to explore what happens in people’s working lives: the relationships, decisions, systems and everyday moments that shape how work feels.
Then we can involve people in designing improvements, test whether those improvements help, and learn from the results.
We can still measure engagement. But we also need to ask:
- What are people experiencing, and why?
- Where would a change make the greatest difference?
- What needs to happen differently in practice?
- How will we know whether it has helped?
An improved score can be valuable evidence. So can a new starter getting the support they need, an employee finding a realistic route to develop, or a manager having enough time to lead their team well.
Those changes are worth understanding in their own right.
Looking beyond the headline numbers
These questions sit at the heart of our new People Lab 2026 Benchmarking Report, which brings together employee engagement and employee experience research, examines what different approaches measure, and explores what the evidence means in practice.
Our aim is to help people use benchmarks thoughtfully and turn what they learn into meaningful improvements.
Because collecting feedback is only the beginning. Its value depends on what we understand, and what we change as a result.
Download the People Lab 2026 Benchmarking Report to explore the evidence, the limitations of comparison and practical questions for deciding what to do next.
Join the conversation
We’ll also be exploring some of the questions raised by the report in an upcoming People Lab webinar.
We’ll look beyond the headline engagement figures to consider what different measures really tell us, what they can’t tell us, and how organisations can move from collecting more data to better understanding people’s experiences and making meaningful improvements.
If you work in employee experience, engagement, HR or internal communication, we’d love you to join us.
