What is employee engagement?

Employee engagement is how much an employee is committed to helping their organization achieve its goals. It's demonstrated by how employees think, feel, and act, as well as the emotional connection they feel towards their organization, their work, and their team.

At its heart, employee engagement—a core construct in organizational psychology—is about how people feel emotionally connected to their work and their organization. It’s that extra heartbeat of emotional connection that makes someone want to go above and beyond, rather than just doing the bare minimum. When your people are truly engaged, they’re genuinely invested in what they do, and are excited to help their whole team succeed.

Free eBook: 2026 Employee Experience Trends

Why is employee engagement important?

Employee engagement is not just another HR metric. It’s a business-wide priority that touches on every aspect of an employee’s work, role, experience—and the organization itself. Employee engagement makes people more inclined to work harder, solve problems, grow and develop faster, get along better with colleagues and customers, and stay longer. 

When employees are engaged, they put in discretionary effort, which increases business outcomes such as: 

Revenue

Highly engaged employees directly boost the bottom line. According to Gallup, highly engaged teams consistently outperform their peers in key business outcomes, such as 23% greater profitability.

Performance

Satisfied, engaged employees are significantly more productive, delivering high-quality work. Research by Oxford University's Saïd Business School has found a conclusive link between employee happiness and 13% higher productivity.

Employee retention

Your engaged, high performing employees are much less likely to leave, reducing your turnover costs and keeping your top talent away from the competition. Research by Effectory found increased engagement led to a 20.6% increase in retention.

Customer experience

Customers receive better service from engaged employees. The Institute of Customer Service found that for every 1% improvement in employee engagement, there is a 0.41 point increase in Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI) score.

Where employee engagement stands today

Like many things in life, employee engagement can go up or down. Our 2026 Global Employee Experience Trends Report uncovered declines in engagement and experience vs expectations, following increases in 2025:

The most important drivers we found are: alignment with deep-rooted values, opportunities for growth, being treated with respect, and faith that a bright future lies ahead. Your employees want to feel connected with your organization and its mission, both now and in the future.

So, your biggest challenge will be balancing two objectives:

1.  To meet the ever-evolving needs of the business
2.  Staying true to the fundamental truths about what motivates and engages your people

The connection between engagement and employee experience (EX)

Employee engagement is important, but it's not the full picture. When you think about it, employees can be engaged, and:

• Still want to leave your organization
• Still be at risk of burnout
• Still not feel like they belong
• Still struggle with unwieldy technology experiences and processes

In the workplace, there’s something bigger than employee engagement—employee experience (EX). This encompasses every interaction, perception, and feeling an employee has throughout their time working at an organization, and has evolved well beyond simple “job satisfaction” or “engagement”.

There’s a crucial connection between EX and engagement. Engagement is important, because it predicts future organizational performance, and we know that the more engaged employees are, the more effort they’ll put into their job. It’s day to day employee experiences that drive engagement, and if they’re great, they directly boost well-being, job satisfaction, and commitment. EX is cumulative—it takes more than that one bad or good day to affect how engaged an employee is.

That’s why measuring engagement alone is no longer enough. So, how do you build a program that captures the full employee experience?

Employee engagement strategies

A program that captures the full employee experience starts with five strategies to consider, each one building on the last. Shift your mindset, understand your KPIs, understand the key drivers behind them, gather experience data, and get the right insights to the right people.

Shift your mindset from engagement to experience

Just as the rise of the service economy opened the door to employee engagement, the experience economy has brought a shift from engagement initiatives to employee experience—a more holistic view of employees’ experiences at work all along their employee lifecycle.

And it's important to remember that it's up to you as the company to provide the experience. Your company culture and company mission must now support, encourage and empower a great employee experience.

Today's most successful organizations are no longer looking at the traditional annual or bi-annual survey as a snapshot of how their employees feel. They’re running employee listening programs that gather feedback throughout the employee lifecycle. We call the feedback these programs generate experience data (or X-data), because it captures the complete employee experience.

Understand the key performance indicators (KPIs) of employee experience

KPIs are the outcome measures that indicate how your organization is doing across key aspects of the employee experience. Track these measurements to make sure you’re providing a great employee experience:

Engagement (the definitive KPI)

Engagement is a long-established employee measurement and is strongly linked to organizational outcomes, such as performance, customer satisfaction, employee retention, strong company culture, and innovation.

Employee engagement isn’t a single metric. It’s a composite measurement that captures how employees think, feel, and act at work over time.

At Qualtrics, we calculate engagement as a composite score based on three core measures:

• Recommend: “I would recommend this company to people I know as a great place to work”
• Accomplish: “My work gives me a feeling of personal accomplishment”
• Motivate: “This company motivates me to contribute more than is normally required to complete my work”

These items are measured using a standardized five‑point Likert scale (Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree) and combined into a single engagement metric.

Engagement is more useful when you track it alongside four other KPIs:

Intent to stay

How long your employees say they intend to stay at your organization. But remember—people can be highly engaged, and leave, or disengaged employees may stay.

Inclusion

This KPI assesses belonging, authenticity, and equity, and it has become a key differentiator between a positive company culture and a negative one. Inclusive organizations are more innovative, productive, and enjoy higher employee retention.

Well-being

This measures employees’ energy, positivity, and relationships so employers can create work environments that protect against burnout, presenteeism, and low productivity.

Experience versus expectations

Employees tell you to what extent their expectations are met at work. Their answers provide unique, individual perspectives. You can easily segment results to differentiate employees’ experiences to find out whether your organization is exceeding, meeting, or falling short of expectations.

Understand the key drivers behind the KPIs

If you want to influence KPIs, you can’t impact them directly. Rather, you have to act on the things that drive them, aka, key drivers.

Key drivers are the aspects of the employee experience that influence the KPIs. Understanding each driver gives you critical signals for starting points when it comes to improving your employee experience.

We use 16 EX key drivers:

1. Autonomy / Empowerment

Are people empowered in their roles and able to make their own decisions on the job?

2. Collaboration

 Are employees able to easily work with other teams or colleagues without barriers or conflict?

3. Customer Focus

Are people in a customer-centric organization and are they empowered to do what's needed?

4. Growth and development

 Are there opportunities for people to grow and develop their careers in the company?

5. Innovation

How well does the company create and adopt new ideas or practices to grow and succeed?

6. Psychological Safety

Do people feel they can speak up, and be their authentic selves at work?

7. Recognition

Do people feel that their efforts are appreciated and recognized?

8. Survey follow up

Do employees feel that actions are taken as a result of their feedback in surveys?

9. Work-life Balance 

Do they feel the company allows them to achieve the balance they need between work and personal life?

10. Ethics and Values

Do they buy into what the company stands for and how they’re a part of it?

11. Job resources

Are they enabled to do their job with the equipment they’re given?

12. Leadership

Do employees believe in and trust their senior leaders?

13. Manager effectiveness

Are managers supporting their teams to be successful?

14. Organizational agility

Can the business move and adapt quickly to seize new opportunities?

15. Performance and rewards

Do people feel that they’re appreciated for their contribution and recognized ?

16. Technology

How effective are the business’s systems, software and tools at helping employees do their jobs?  

After a few weeks or months of taking action to improve these key drivers, you’ll start to see the KPIs shift.

And now you have a more rounded and actionable understanding of employee experience. See the connection with engagement? To know which drivers to act on, you need data on how each one is performing.

Gather employee experience data

Consider the lifetime of an employee at your organization (the employee journey). There are key milestones along the way, whether it's their interview, new job onboarding process, performance reviews, and other experiences and moments that matter that crop up during their career. Think of these as experience loops rather than a one-way path: what you learn at each moment should shape what you do next.

You need to gather data from each key milestone in your employees’ journeys. Modern EX programs are evolving beyond surveys as the main way of listening to employees, integrating omnichannel listening, always-on feedback, unsolicited feedback, and passive signal analysis to build a complete, real-time understanding of workforce experience. Even so, a well thought-out survey strategy is still a core part of any listening program. 

Here are the main surveys and listening mechanisms you can use:

• Always-on employee feedback: An on-demand, anonymous avenue where employees can raise issues and provide employee feedback
• Ad hoc surveys: Just-in-time feedback on specific initiatives, e.g., organizational changes, job satisfaction
• Employee lifecycle feedback: Event-triggered feedback that gets employees' views at key milestones in their journey with a company. It includes candidate, new hire, onboarding, exit, and training feedback
• Multi-rater assessments: Performance and development evaluations that simplify the 360 reviews and feedback from peers, managers, and direct reports
• Census engagement surveys: The annual or bi-annual “deep dive”, covering the widest range of topics
• Pulse surveys: Shorter “temperature” check-ins that measure the KPIs and home in on the most important issues identified by the census survey

Each mechanism presents an opportunity to gather feedback and understand the key drivers of employee experience and how to improve it.

Enlightened employee experience leaders also gather operational data (O-data): employee churn rates, adoption of benefits programs, participation in affinity groups, etc. Combine this with experience data (X-data) and you’ll get an even fuller picture of your people's experience.

Get the right insights to the right people

You must decide who gets which insights to action them. The data must go to those stakeholders who can act on the feedback received. There's nothing more dispiriting for employees than to give feedback, then nothing gets done as a result. Executives will need different insights from managers, and HR leaders will need different insights altogether.

How to measure employee engagement

Now that you know what to measure and who needs the insights, it’s time to put it into practice. Here’s how to do it, step by step.

1. Design your employee engagement survey

A well-designed survey is still the most structured way to set your engagement baseline, and it gives the rest of your listening something to build on. Getting the design right is part of your employee engagement strategy, because the questions you ask shape the insights you can act on.

Design with intention

Keep your survey structure simple and intuitive. Take a step back and understand what you want to measure, why you want to measure it, and who to collect feedback from to make sure it’s aligned with your wider business and people strategy. Then, the feedback will provide the insights you need to act on, and ultimately improve the employee experience.

Devise the right questions

Your employee engagement survey should not only help you address challenges and identify experience gaps at your organization, but also highlight all the good stuff that you're doing right in the eyes of engaged employees. To increase employee engagement, you need to be sure that your questions will deliver useful insights into their employee experience.

Your questions should cover three key areas:

• Your KPIs (e.g., Engagement, Intent to Stay, Wellbeing, Inclusion, Experience vs.Expectation). These questions go at the front of your survey.
• Your key drivers (the aspects of the employee experience that influence your KPIs, such as leadership, growth and development, recognition, and manager effectiveness). These help you identify what’s driving, or detracting from, engagement.
• Any other topics, depending on what's happening in your company or market at the time. But keep it light—only ask relevant questions to prevent your employee engagement survey from becoming too unwieldy.

In line with the industry standard, we recommend that employee engagement surveys use a 5-point Likert scale (Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree) for all items. 

Here are some examples of great employee engagement survey questions. You'll notice the questions cover several of the key engagement themes mentioned above.

1. Senior leaders in my organization prioritize people’s well-being above immediate profit or gains
2. There is a promising future for me at this organization
3. I feel supported in efforts to adapt to organizational changes
4. I can share my opinions openly without fear of retaliation
5. I have seen positive changes taking place as a result of previous surveys
6. Overall, to what extent does your experience with the technology at this company meet your expectations?
7. Work processes allow employees to be as productive as possible

Remember also to add at least one open comment question to your survey—a more general question at the end, or another between questions to gather more detail.

2. Run your survey

To collect the greatest amount of responses, survey employees properly by inviting everyone in your company to respond, and keep a close eye on response rates. You might need to keep the survey open for two to three weeks to give people the best opportunity to give their feedback.

Treat your survey results as one input rather than the whole story. Combine them with always-on feedback and operational data for a fuller picture of the employee experience.

3. Analyze your results

Once your data is in, you need to turn it into insights. With the right analysis, you’ll see what's driving key metrics, such as engagement, so you know where to focus your improvements.

For example, our Engagement Headlines widget shows managers their KPIs, the drivers that matter most for each, and how people rated them, all in one easy-to-read view:

Managers will see exactly what they're doing well, and what they need to focus on for improvement—in this case, they need to put more work into the drivers of inclusion and well-being.

By focusing on the high impact/low scoring drivers, you'll tackle areas with the biggest impact on all the KPIs to deliver a great employee experience in your company.

4. Tell the story with the data

Few of us feel excited and motivated by a mass of numbers and statistics on a screen. But combine your data with a strong, captivating visual story, and you can engage your audience, sparking enthusiasm and action. 

Here are three things you need to do to make your storytelling compelling:

Start with the right questions

What does the data tell us? Who needs to see this data? How can we communicate it to the right audience? How can the data help us solve our critical business issues (e.g., early attrition)? How can we use it to make a difference?

Know your audience

How much do they know? How sophisticated are they? How familiar are they with the subject? All this will help guide you with designing your visual story.

Simplify, simplify, simplify

People want information delivered as quickly and simply as possible. Edit your data and information to give just the crucial information needed to make your point. Then create your next visual to make your next point. Think of it as putting your story together one chapter at a time, instead of trying to do it all once.

Better storytelling will help your data insights make a greater impact.

How to improve employee engagement

The best way to boost employee engagement is by acting on the insights. Our 2026 EX Trends Report found that the more listening that’s conducted, the more action is perceived, which in turn leads to more employee engagement:

“Ask more questions of your long-tenured, committed employees. Ask them about their concerns and what you can do to support them. And don’t just listen to them; show them, through your actions, that you’re listening!” 

 

- Benjamin Granger PhD, Chief Workplace Psychologist, Qualtrics XM Institute

There's a science to improving employee engagement. But unfortunately, there's no simple cookie-cutter approach—it all comes down to understanding your own key drivers and company context so you can act to improve what will have the biggest impact.

There are three effective employee engagement strategies you can use to approach your improvements:

1. At an organizational level, work with your leadership team to identify the key drivers that affect everyone and are company-wide (e.g., a new IT system).
2. At a team level, this is where you'll make the biggest impact. The vast majority of key drivers are things direct supervisors can impact, such as career growth, resolving issues at work, or clarifying objectives.
3. Understand that progress is more important than perfection, and it’s consistent actions that lead to meaningful change. You can implement some actions quickly, whereas others need more time. Include some ‘quick wins’ in your action planning so that your teams can see overall progress and small victories along the way, while weathering the inevitable plateaus and setbacks: 

Tips for keeping your employee engagement program fresh

Remember to review your strategy

A successful, long term employee engagement strategy is not static—it will evolve over time as your workforce changes and your employee engagement program matures. If you've been running your employee engagement program for a while, you may find it's no longer getting the responses or results it used to. 

Ask yourself, "Are we still measuring what will help us achieve our goals?" Look in detail at the questions you're asking. Remove any that may now be redundant or irrelevant.

Watch for questions that:

• Score very highly year-on-year
• Are frequently skipped (maybe they're either not relevant or the question is confusing)
• Are not actionable or answerable—every item should have an action and resources connected to it
• Now seem irrelevant or outdated to your organization

Reconsider frequency

The timing of your engagement survey is critical to getting a good response rate. If you usually do an annual survey and worry that it’s going to be harder to take effective action with more frequent feedback, be reassured by what we found in our 2026 EX Trends Report research:

• Employees whose companies ramped up listening reported higher engagement, stronger intent to stay, better well-being, and greater inclusion
• People whose employers increased listening frequency reported more action as a result
• Employees who’ve seen positive outcomes from previous changes are more than three times as engaged as those who haven’t

Personalize engagement

Think about ways you can engage better with individual employees on the survey. You could have:

• Individual reports for each employee to view a summary of their results after completion
• A central place for employees to view results, or a general sharing of results
• Other channels of communication—do you rely solely on email, or are there other platforms you can use?

The future of employee engagement

In the future, employee engagement measurement will go beyond static, one‑off surveys towards more intuitive, connected, and human listening. While engagement surveys aren’t going away anytime soon, AI will increasingly support them to help your teams make sense of data faster using comment summaries, interactive coaching, and clearer recommendations for action.

We’ll also see more agentic AI support for turning insights into action, as well as stronger connections between employee experience and customer experience data to join the dots of business outcomes more fully.

Employee listening will become more frequent, and targeted—especially for previously neglected frontline employees. Ask: What worked today on your shift? What tools/systems need improvement? What can help you solve customer problems better? The traditional biannual/annual or quarterly surveys will combine with passive and omni‑channel listening to capture what’s happening day to day, in real time.

All of this will come together in holistic dashboards that show the full employee journey and/or CX and EX data. Leaders will be focusing less on the task of collecting feedback, and more on acting on the data in ways that genuinely improve work, employee and customer experience, and ultimately the bottom line.

What is employee engagement software?

Take the guesswork out of employee experience by investing in an employee engagement software. Employee engagement software is a digital tool specifically designed to help you listen to employees, understand their experience, and act on it to improve their satisfaction, engagement, involvement, motivation and productivity.

Engagement software sits within experience management (XM), the practice of understanding and acting on the experiences that shape how people feel about an organization. The best engagement programs make running complex analysis easy—whether it’s identifying the key drivers of engagement or automatically surfacing the actions that have the biggest impact on engagement.

The best programs also map the results back to leadership, delivering them straight to managers' inboxes so they can get stuck in immediately and start improving things for their teams. What sets programs apart is how quickly and consistently leaders act on what they learn.

The best employee engagement software includes:

• Employee listening, from feedback surveys to other signals
• Communication platforms
• Engagement analytics
• Actionable insights and action planning for managers