The latest UK engagement report suggests we’ve been solving the wrong problem. Every year another employee engagement report lands. And every year we see another headline telling us engagement is falling, rising slightly or stubbornly refusing to move.
This year’s Engage for Success UK Employee Engagement Survey tells a familiar story. UK engagement remains at 62%, unchanged from the previous year and still significantly below pre-pandemic levels. Employees aren’t actively disengaged, but they aren’t exactly enthusiastic either. They’re turning up, doing the work, but without the energy, advocacy and commitment organisations need to thrive.
For many organisations, the instinctive response will be to ask:
“How do we improve engagement?”
But you might be surprised to hear that we think that’s the wrong question. One of the most interesting aspects of the report isn’t actually the engagement score itself. It’s what drives it.
Throughout the research, engagement consistently rises when employees experience better day-to-day working conditions. Organisations that genuinely prioritise people when making decisions achieve much higher engagement scores. Those offering stronger wellbeing support, better learning opportunities, more opportunities to have a voice and supportive line managers all outperform those that don’t.
In other words, engagement isn’t acting independently, it’s responding to experience. And that’s an important distinction. Because if engagement is an outcome, treating it as the objective is a little like trying to improve customer satisfaction without changing anything about the customer experience.
You can measure it endlessly, spending huge amounts of time, effort and money. You just can’t directly create it.
Organisations don’t have an engagement problem
They have an experience problem. When we work with organisations, we rarely begin by talking about engagement. Instead we ask different questions.
- What is it actually like to join here?
- How easy is it to get work done?
- How do managers make people feel?
- Where does frustration build?
- Which moments create trust and which quietly erode it?
Those experiences accumulate every single day, and eventually they become culture. And then eventually they become engagement scores.
The report reinforces this thinking. One of its strongest findings is the relationship between leaders genuinely prioritising people issues and employee engagement. Where employees believed leaders and managers consistently considered wellbeing, culture and people’s needs in their decisions, engagement reached 77%. Where they didn’t, engagement dropped to just 45%.
That’s not an engagement intervention, it’s a leadership behaviour.
Experience works like an ecosystem
Another finding caught our attention. The report shows engagement improves not because organisations introduce one brilliant initiative, but because they provide multiple complementary practices. Wellbeing, employee voice, learning and development, social connection and supportive management work together to create a stronger employee experience.
We see this repeatedly in our own work – organisations often look for the silver bullet.
- A new survey platform.
- A wellbeing campaign.
- An engagement app.
- A manager toolkit.
Each may help, but none changes the overall experience on its own. People experience behaves much more like a system. Every interaction either reinforces or undermines every other interaction.
The organisations making real progress aren’t necessarily doing one thing brilliantly.
They’re designing lots of connected experiences well.
Maybe we’ve been measuring the wrong thing
Engagement still matters, it’s an incredibly useful indicator. But perhaps we need to stop treating it as the destination.
Think about how we approach customer experience. Very few organisations start by trying to improve customer satisfaction scores. They improve products, services, interactions, journeys and moments that matter. And customer satisfaction follows.
Employee experience works exactly the same way. Design better experiences. Build better leadership habits. Create meaningful opportunities for people to contribute. Make work easier, fairer and more human.
Engagement becomes the consequence rather than the objective.
A different question
The Engage for Success report provides valuable evidence that engagement remains stubbornly flat across the UK. But hidden within the findings is a much more optimistic message.
Organisations are not powerless.
The drivers of higher engagement are remarkably consistent and, importantly, they are within an organisation’s control.
So perhaps the question leaders should stop asking is:
“How do we improve engagement?”
Instead, ask:
“What experiences are we creating every day that make engagement inevitable?”
At People Lab, that’s the conversation we’re far more interested in having. Because when you design better experiences, engagement rarely needs fixing at all. So, the next time someone asks, “How do we improve engagement?”, perhaps the better question is, “How well have we designed the experiences that create it?”
If that’s a conversation you’d like to have, we’d love to help.
