What is employee engagement? A definition and program guide

What is employee engagement?

Our definition of employee engagement is:

"An employee’s connection to their work, their role, and their organization, expressed through behavior that contributes to organizational success".

At its heart, employee engagement—a core construct in organizational psychology—is about how connected people feel 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

The connection between engagement and employee experience (EX)

Employee engagement is important, and a good thing. However, 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.

How to measure employee engagement

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.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the outcome measures that indicate how your organization is doing across key aspects of the employee experience. Engagement is the definitive KPI, the gold standard employee measurement. It’s strongly linked to organizational outcomes, such as performance, customer satisfaction, employee retention, strong company culture, and innovation.

You can combine it with 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: Assessing belonging, authenticity and equity, this 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 workplaces where their people don't risk burnout, presenteeism, and/or 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.

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: 

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? 

Why is employee engagement important?

Research shows that employee engagement makes people more inclined to work harder and solve problems, grow and develop faster, get along with people better, and stay longer at their company. 

All these factors, according to Gallup, have a measurable business impact, and contribute to organizational success. When comparing levels of employee engagement, Gallup found that “top-and bottom-quartile business units and teams had the following differences in business outcomes”:

• 81% in absenteeism
• 58% in patient safety incidents (mortality and falls)
• 18% in turnover for high-turnover organizations
• 43% in turnover for low-turnover organizations
• 28% in shrinkage (theft)
• 64% in safety incidents (accidents)
• 41% in quality (defects)
• 10% in customer loyalty/engagement
• 18% in productivity (sales)
• 23% in profitability

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 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 people

How to create an employee engagement program

First, you’ll need to shift your mindset from employee engagement initiatives to employee experience (EX). Just as the rise of the service economy opened the door to employee engagement, the experience economy has seen a shift towards 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 this experience data (or X-data), as it seeks to understand the complete employee experience.

Gather employee experience data using surveys

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.

There’s a variety of surveys and employee listening mechanisms you can use to gather data about your employee experience: 

• Always-on employee feedback: an on-demand, anonymous avenue where employees can raise issues and provide 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.

Design your employee engagement survey

Designing an effective survey is part of your employee engagement strategy and needs careful thought to give you the best possible results and data. 

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 improve 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:

1. Your KPIs (e.g., Engagement, Intent to Stay, Wellbeing, Inclusion, Experience vs.Expectation). These questions go at the front of your survey.

2. Your key drivers (e.g., autonomy and empowerment, career progression, collaboration, communication, leadership, recognition, resources, strategy, management support, and training and development). These identify conditions that might cause (or detract from) employee engagement.

3. 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.

Run your survey

So that you 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.

Analyze your survey 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 the drivers of engagement and other KPIs all together, what the most important drivers of these KPIs are, and how people rated them—all in an easy-to-read format:

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.

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:

1.  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?

2.  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.

3.  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.

Remember to review your strategy

An employee engagement program is not static—it will evolve over time as your workforce changes and your employee engagement strategy 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?

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:

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:

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 (EX) and customer experience (CX) 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 program. Employee engagement software is a digital tool specifically designed to help you measure, track and ultimately improve your employees’ satisfaction, engagement, involvement, motivation and productivity.

Sometimes known as ‘experience management (XM)’ programs, 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.

They include:

• employee feedback surveys
• communication platforms
• engagement analytics
• actionable insights

Qualtrics® EX25 XM® Solution

Our EX25 solution is the next generation of employee engagement. EX25 is a guided employee engagement program that measures the holistic employee experience. It uses Qualtrics’ practical, actionable EX25 framework to help you understand what drives the full employee experience, empower your managers to act on real-time insights, and help you make continuous improvement across your entire organization.