Employee Engagement

Your Employee Experience Roundup: The Manager Crisis, Falling Worker Confidence, and Persistent Perception Gaps

Are leaders and their employees actually working in the same organisation? That’s the question that springs to mind when looking at the key events and research findings of this week. Decision-makers think engagement is rising; employees disagree by 21 percentage points....

Worker Confidence Fell for the First Time in Three Years – and Organisations Are Not Tracking It

Worker confidence is falling – both in AI and in organisations’ long-term outlook. But fewer organisations are tracking employee belief, leaving leaders in the dark about how their people actually feel about the future of work. ManpowerGroup’s 2026 Global Talent Barometer,...

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...

Profits Are Up. Employees Are Paying the Price.

The sales team is hitting targets, profits are up, and cashflow is healthy – all clear signs of a thriving organisation. And yet what it actually feels like to work in a successful business has changed, and not for the...

Your Employee Experience Roundup: Perception Gaps, Disengaged Managers and the Agentic AI Future

Every fortnight, I’ll be rounding up the latest employee experience news, research and insights, and pulling out the threads that connect them. So if you’re too busy to track every report drop, every new trend, or indeed every time a...

What Meta’s AI Avatar Tells us About the Future of Workplace Trust

Meta is building a photorealistic, AI-powered version of Mark Zuckerberg. Trained on his mannerisms, tone, publicly available statements and his own thinking on company strategy. The goal is apparently that employees “might feel more connected to the founder through interactions...

The Pay Transparency Disconnect: Why Employees and HR See Pay So Differently

Most HR professionals believe pay at their organisation is fair, yet barely half think their employees agree. Published yesterday, Salary.com’s 2026 State of Pay and Compensation Practices Report finds a 31-point confidence gap between what HR believes about pay fairness and what...

Sales Performance Rises 22% When Managers Build Trust Skills

Managers with the ability to build trust across their teams significantly increase the chance of hitting sales targets, new data suggests. Research by MindTools Kineo, launched in 2023 and continuing today, highlights how managers’ non-technical, human skills contribute to business outcomes...

Leaders Are Engaged, Angry and Lonely — and Organisations Need to Pay Attention

Leaders are your organisation’s most engaged people, and most satisfied in their personal lives. Yet they are also most likely to feel angry, stressed, and lonely day to day. Revealing this paradox is Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report....

Meet your new EX editor

You cannot deliver a great customer experience if you fail to get your employee experience right. The connection between the two is clear, and yet siloes remain in both organisations and across media coverage. As the new Employee Experience Editor...

Employee Engagement is Sliding and Productivity is Paying the Price

When the job market is strong, disengaged employees leave. When it tightens, they stay and show up checked out, delivering less. That double bind is the central warning in Gallup’s newly published analysis of its State of the Global Workplace...

You Can’t Engage Employees With Criteria They Don’t Understand

When performance criteria are vague, generic, or overloaded, the damage runs deeper than a frustrating review cycle. New research from HR advisory firm McLean & Company finds that poorly designed evaluation frameworks are weakening trust, raising stress levels, and contributing...