April 30, 2026
Employee Engagement Is Declining Globally. So Why Aren’t CEOs Worried?
Employee engagement is declining globally and has been for two years. Should CEOs be worried? You would think the answer to this question is obvious – employee engagement has a direct knock-on effect on customer experience. Low engagement is linked to mediocre service, higher employee turnover, and reduced productivity. It’s obvious, really.
So how do we explain Boston Consulting Group’s recent finding that employee engagement is a concern for only 38% of CEOs?
What’s keeping them up at night is their growth targets, managing costs and meeting expectations of the board, with workforce satisfaction coming in after that.
When asked specifically whether employee engagement was a concern, 20% of CEOs were not at all concerned about rising levels of disgruntlement and 42% were only ‘somewhat concerned’.
Employees are a major source of stress, but the steady decline in employee engagement globally may seem like ‘tomorrow’s problem’ compared with the day-to-day stressors CEOs are dealing with.
Presenting issue vs system issue
As leaders move up an organisation, their sources of information need to evolve. In lower to middle management, leaders get information directly. They are close enough to the operation to see, in real time, what is happening day-to-day. And their remit is to respond to day-to-day operations.
But once you reach executive level, and even more so when you become CEO, you are too far away from day-to-day operations for that to be your source of information. More importantly, your remit is no longer day-to-day operations. Or, it shouldn’t be. At this level, your primary lens is strategic. And what you should be looking for is systemic problems, not presenting issues.
When an employee is unhappy about their new shift schedule, a middle manager will need to be curious about that. How can the new schedule work for that employee? Does something need to be changed in the schedule? Is the employee still a good fit for the role?
But the CEO shouldn’t be looking at data, individual by individual. The CEO isn’t even interested in a swathe of concerns about shift schedules. That’s the COO’s job. Or perhaps the HRD. Or maybe it shouldn’t even reach them, being an issue for the Head of Scheduling or Workforce Planning. That specific trend about a specific issue shouldn’t reach the Executive team.
Instead, the CEO is sensing systemic trends, where an emerging problem with shift schedules is an indicator of something else going on, probably unrelated to working hours and scheduling.
Finding the shared root cause
What else is happening that might be connected? Are you struggling with recruitment? Attrition? Are people complaining about the quality of the coffee in the breakroom? Are there more grievances? Are people taking more duvet days?
The question for CEOs is ‘What’s this really about?’.
A cluster of seemingly unrelated issues may have a shared root cause – lack of empowerment, poor quality communication, or metrics driving counter-productive behaviours.
Plummeting global employee engagement is an indicator
A tuned-in CEO sees global trends in the same way. It may not be an issue in their business, yet. But why would their business be immune? The best CEOs are healthily circumspect.
They also recognise that being ahead of issues before they become urgent should be their day-to-day. If report after report declares employee engagement is declining, that should be a cause for concern.
It’s easy to get distracted by urgent, important issues. Fixing those got you to senior leadership. And it feels productive to dive into a specific issue and sort it out.
When we look at what is causing CEOs stress it’s short-term stuff. It’s this year or this quarter. The BCG report itself says “Near-term issues often consume an outsized share” of CEO time.
CEOs need time to think, to reflect, and to ask, ‘What do the pressures I am under, and the pressures our business is under, tell me about where my attention should be?’ They can’t do that when they are in back-to-back meetings, when short-term problems are escalated to them constantly, and when, frankly, they love to get their hands dirty.
Tensions and optical mixing
There is a paradox at the heart of a CEO’s role (and this applies to any senior executive to an extent).
They need to be in two places at once.
1. They need to notice tensions in the system.
They need to be curious about indicators – the presenting issues. Without getting bogged down in the details or being dragged into conversations about how to fix them, they need to be close enough to understand whether a tension is isolated or whether a cluster of tensions is emerging.
CEOs are sometimes ignorant of how people really feel. No one wants to tell them. Or they only ever hear the vocal minority who may, or may not, represent the quiet majority.
But also, CEOs are living a different reality. Like a train going through a tunnel, they are in the front carriage. They go into the tunnel first, but they are already out the other side when their people are just heading into darkness.
The CEO starts to feel optimistic exactly when their people are most afraid. Unless they are willing to go towards tensions, and listen with an open mind, they will have no idea what’s going on in their company.
2. At the same time, they need to stand way, way back, and take in the whole picture.
From there they can see, at a high level, how tensions may be connected, just like when you step back from a Pointillist painting, the tiny dots emerge as a clear picture. In the world of art this effect is known as ‘optical mixing’ – our eyes’ ability to blend the dots to form a scene. Senior leaders need to do this too.
This shift from ‘hands dirty’ to ‘curious sensors’ is essential today. The trends heading our way in business – AI, geo-political disruption, the climate crisis and spiralling employee disengagement – can’t be understood or addressed at close range. These are not short-term fixes. Someone in the business needs to be taking notice and making it their job to think systemically about their implications. Who better than the CEO?
Blaire Palmer, Founder and CEO of That People Thing, is an expert on the future of work and the future of leadership. She has more than 25 years of experience supporting business leaders navigating organisational transformation, and is a keynote speaker and author of several books, including ‘Punks in Suits: How to lead the workplace reformation’.
