Employee engagement trends reveal a complex landscape shaped by evolving work arrangements, generational shifts, and economic uncertainties. Our comprehensive analysis of employee experience data from 2021-2024 surfaces critical insights for business leaders and HR professionals.
Employees believing in their company’s future are 25 times more likely to be engaged, while those lacking this confidence are 75 times more likely to be disengaged.
The engagement gap between senior leaders and individual contributors has widened by 3.5 points since 2021, signaling a growing disconnect.
Gen Z shows a 4-point decline in intent to stay since 2022, despite maintaining similar satisfaction levels as other generations.
Remote/hybrid workers demonstrate significantly higher work/life balance satisfaction than onsite counterparts, while also providing stronger manager effectiveness ratings (81% vs. 76%).
Bridge Leadership Disconnects: Implement structured two-way communication channels between senior leaders and front-line employees.
Strengthen Career Development: Focus on clear growth pathways, particularly for younger generations.
Enhance Strategic Alignment: Connect individual contributions to organizational vision, especially in distributed work environments.
Optimize Work Arrangements: Leverage data showing remote/hybrid effectiveness while addressing collaboration needs.
Organizations that act on these insights position themselves to better attract, retain, and engage talent in an increasingly competitive labor market. The following report details our findings and provides practical implementation guidance for business leaders.
The landscape of work has undergone a seismic shift in recent years, fundamentally altering how employees engage with their organizations, colleagues, and work itself. The traditional paradigm of office-based work has given way to a more complex ecosystem encompassing in-office, remote, and hybrid arrangements. This transformation, accelerated by global events and technological advances, has created new challenges and opportunities for employee engagement— a critical factor in organizational success, productivity, and talent retention.
Our study is particularly timely as organizations grapple with several external factors that significantly impact the employee experience. Historical trend data from 2019 through 2024 reveals a compelling narrative about the relationship between employee engagement and manager effectiveness. While overall engagement levels have reverted to pre-pandemic levels since the peak in 2020, manager effectiveness ratings have consistently tracked higher post-pandemic. Notably, both metrics showed resilience during the global disruptions of 2020, with manager effectiveness maintaining an upward trajectory even as engagement experienced modest fluctuations.
This data suggests that many organizations were able to successfully develop their management capabilities during a period of unprecedented workplace transformation, while translating this enhanced management effectiveness into sustained engagement improvements remains a challenge. In addition, the determinants of engagement have become increasingly complex in today’s multi-modal work environment, necessitating a deeper understanding of how various work arrangements and managerial relationships influence the employee experience.
Over the past several years, a worldwide health crisis, a near recession followed by an inflation roller coaster, and political divisions and conflicts across the globe have created massive disruption and change affecting workforces around the globe. Despite these global influences, for the purpose of this paper, we have intentionally focused on data from the United States and Canada in order to control for country/regional/cultural differences that are known to exist in employee survey data.
From the 30,000-foot view, year-over-year engagement trends have remained stable since 2021; however, the trends become more varied when analyzed in six month periods–as seen in Figure 1 (with data points representing the first half, H1, and second half, H2). At 71% favorable, the first half of 2024 mirrors that of H2 2021, when engagement was at its lowest. With a rise of 2 points, engagement was higher within the second half of 2024. Manager Effectiveness also rose 2 points during the second half of 2024.
While engagement has stabilized to pre-crisis levels (which is what we would expect), Manager Effectiveness has remained at an all-time high. One rationale for this phenomenon is that companies, senior leadership in particular, have had to navigate uncharted territory with varying degrees of success, spanning from supply chain issues, and inventory shortages, to layoffs and remote/hybrid work policies. In such situations, the relationship between the employee and their direct manager takes on even greater significance—they become the employee’s lifeline and conduit to the rest of the organization. Therefore, direct managers have become, and remain an integral part of the overall employee experience.
Authors:
Robert Weldon, Ph.D., Director of WSAdata, WSA
Sheena Lyons, M.S., Executive Consultant, WSA
Cameron Klein, Ph.D., Executive Consultant WSA
Lisa Wager, M.S., Executive Consultant, WSA
Kris Erickson, Co-Founder and Executive Consultant, WSA
James Longabaugh, Ph.D., Director of Consulting, WSA
