Karina Young
Employee disengagement is a costly business problem that deserves the attention of every leadership team. The total global economic cost of disengaged employees exceeds $8.8 trillion annually, according to Gallup. The same group cited employee engagement hitting an 11-year low in 2024.
Organizations with highly engaged employees outperform their competitors by every key measure, including customer loyalty, market share and profitability. But too often, disengagement in an organization begins to feel like an intractable problem that’s nearly impossible even to understand, let alone do anything about.
I’ve been there. It’s frustrating. And it doesn’t need to be this way.
Fixing employee engagement starts with a better diagnosis
While businesses collectively spend billions to address disengagement, they often struggle to identify the most actionable causes and pinpoint ways to improve it. It’s an expensive guessing game that yields little progress.
Anyone can generate a measure of engagement. But diagnosing specific problem areas with pinpoint accuracy finally creates a shared understanding of what’s working, what’s not and where to focus. In the diagnosis phase, leaders should identify the one or two most impactful, actionable drivers of disengagement among the most critical employee segments so they can take the right action in the right places. It’s also critical to draw the through-line from disengaged employees to business risk.
As a company, we’re committed to increasing customer retention by 15% next year. But disengagement among high performers on our Customer Experience team has doubled over the last two quarters, driven largely by a lack of role clarity. We’re counting on this team to help us improve customer loyalty.
We believe we need to achieve at least a 25% improvement in engagement among this critical employee cohort by Q2 to help this team perform and retain our best people.
With a precise diagnosis directly connected to a key business priority, HR teams can confidently transition into the next phase of increasing engagement with confidence: planning. Continue reading