Employee Engagement: The Skill That Could Change It All
One of the most important skills a frontline manager needs to master is employee engagement. This isn't a soft, feel-good topic — it's a business-critical one, measured in both people and dollars. Before we get into what you can do about it, let me share a few numbers worth sitting with.
Engagement by the Numbers (Gallup)
Only 31% of US and Canadian employees are engaged — down from a peak of 36% in 2020
25% of hybrid and remote workers are engaged
Remote workers report higher engagement (30%) than on-site, non-remote-capable employees (17%)
Managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement
That last number is the one that matters most. We'll come back to it.
Reasons for Disengagement
Management — Managers and team leaders are the primary drivers of disengagement. Employees who feel unheard, unseen, or poorly led are significantly more likely to mentally check out.
Uncertainty — The perceived likelihood of job elimination due to AI or automation has spiked to 23% for employees in organizations actively implementing it.
Workplace Stress — Half of all employees in the U.S. and Canada report significant daily stress — the highest rate worldwide.
And the cost of getting this wrong: disengaged employees are typically 18% less productive and cost companies an average of $3,400 to $10,000 per worker annually in lost output.
If your team feels stressed, overwhelmed, and stuck in low gear, disengagement may be exactly what you're dealing with. And now you know who has the most influence over fixing it.
That would be you.
Why It Happens
Before getting into tactics, it helps to understand why your team disengages in the first place. In my experience working with frontline managers, it almost always comes back to one of three things:
1. No Clarity People don't know what "good" looks like, why their work matters, or where the team is headed. When people are uncertain, they go quiet, and quiet gets mistaken for lazy or checked out.
2. No Psychological Safety They don't feel safe enough to speak up, take initiative, or admit they're struggling. If people are afraid of looking incompetent or getting shut down, they'll do exactly what's asked, nothing more, nothing less.
3. No Trust in You (Yet) They're not sure you'll go to bat for them, tell them the truth, or follow through on what you say. Trust is built slowly and lost fast. If you're newer to the role, this one takes intentional work.
Your Turn: Of the three root causes: no clarity, no psychological safety, no trust, which one is showing up most on your team right now? Be honest. The answer is probably the one you least want to look at.
If you are ready to work on this, click here for a discovery call.
Communication: Your Highest-Leverage Tool
Of the three root causes above, communication touches all of them. Clarity lives or dies by how well you communicate expectations. Safety is built or broken by how you respond when people speak up. Trust is earned — or not — by whether your words and actions match over time.
This is why communication is the first and most powerful lever you have. And it costs nothing but intention.
Clarify constantly. Your team can't perform to a standard they can't see. Make sure updates are clear, concise, and delivered on a predictable schedule, not when you get around to it. Cut the jargon. Translate company messaging into what it actually means for the person sitting across from you. If they can't connect your words to their work, the message didn't land.
Make it a two-way street. Creating a safe space for honest feedback isn't a nice-to-have; it's a mindset. Regular one-on-ones, open-door availability, team check-ins where you actually listen rather than report out. When someone brings you an idea or a concern, close the loop. Tell them what you did with it. Nothing kills engagement faster than speaking up and hearing nothing back. Silence reads as dismissal, every time.
Connect the dots to purpose. Your team doesn't just want to know what they're doing, they want to know why it matters. Break down how their individual contributions connect to the bigger picture. This is one of the most underrated, underused moves a manager can make, and it costs exactly zero dollars and about thirty seconds of thought per conversation.
Recognize specifically and often. Vague praise lands flat. "Good job, team" is the participation trophy of management feedback. Specific recognition, calling out the exact behavior, the exact moment, the exact impact, lands completely differently. Make appreciation frequent, personal, and real. Public recognition builds team morale. Private recognition builds individual loyalty. You need both.
Be honest, even when it's uncomfortable. Your team can handle hard news far better than they can handle being kept in the dark. Use empathetic, direct language. Check in on how people are doing, not just how the work is going. There's a difference, and they notice whether you know it.
Your Turn: Think about the last week. Did your team hear from you with clarity and consistency? Did anyone bring you a concern — and did you close the loop? If you're not sure, that's your answer.
If you're ready to work on this, [book a discovery call here.]
Psychological Safety and Connection
If communication is about what you say, psychological safety is about what your team feels comfortable saying back.
And this is where a lot of new managers quietly lose the plot. They're doing everything "right," running one-on-ones, sharing updates, recognizing wins, and still noticing that nobody pushes back, nobody volunteers ideas, nobody admits when something isn't working. The team is polite. Cooperative. And completely surface-level.
That's not engagement. That's compliance with good manners.
Psychological safety is the degree to which your team believes it's safe to speak up, take a risk, or admit a mistake without being embarrassed, punished, or ignored. Research from Google's Project Aristotle, one of the most cited team performance studies ever done, found it was the single most important factor in high-performing teams. Not talent. Not resources. Not strategy.
Whether people feel safe.
Here's what low psychological safety actually looks like on a frontline team:
The same two or three people talk in every meeting
Nobody asks questions when you explain something new
Mistakes get hidden rather than surfaced
"That's fine" becomes the default answer to everything
People wait to be told what to do instead of taking initiative
Sound familiar? Here's the uncomfortable truth: your team's behavior is largely a reflection of the environment you've created, even unintentionally. The good news is that means you can change it.
Respond well when things go wrong. This is the highest-leverage moment you have. When someone makes a mistake, how you respond in the next sixty seconds either opens the door or closes it, for that person and for everyone watching. Blame and frustration teach people to hide problems. Curiosity and calm teach people to surface them. Ask what happened. Focus on the system, not the person. Make it clear that mistakes are how you learn what needs fixing.
Ask more than you tell. New managers often overcompensate by having all the answers. It signals confidence, sure, but it also signals that your opinion is what matters most. Start replacing statements with questions. "Here's what I think we should do" becomes "What do you think we should do here?" You'll get better solutions, and your team will feel like participants rather than passengers.
Normalize not knowing. If you model intellectual honesty, "I don't know, let me find out" or "I got that wrong, here's what I should have done," your team will follow. Managers who perform certainty they don't have train their teams to do the same. Managers who model honest uncertainty create teams that tell the truth.
Make your one-on-ones count. Not status updates. Not task reviews. Actual conversations about how the person is doing, what's getting in their way, and what they need from you. Ask questions you don't already know the answer to. And then, this part is critical, do something with what they tell you. Even small follow-through builds trust faster than almost anything else.
Check your reactions. This one is subtle but it matters. If someone brings you a problem and you immediately go into fix-it mode, interrupt, or get visibly stressed, they'll stop bringing you problems. Your emotional responses are data your team is constantly reading. They're deciding whether it's safe to tell you the truth based on how you've responded before.
Psychological safety doesn't mean every conversation is comfortable. It means your team trusts that discomfort won't be used against them. That's the environment where people actually do their best work, and where your job as a manager starts to feel a lot less like crowd control.
The Payoff
Engaged employees are more likely to:
Take initiative and go beyond what's expected
Stay with their company longer
Deliver better customer outcomes
Collaborate effectively with others
Show resilience under stress or change
That's not a HR talking point. That's your job getting easier, one honest conversation at a time.
The 70% figure you saw at the top of this post? It's not a burden. It's an opportunity. Most managers never realize how much influence they actually have.
You're already ahead.
Your Turn: You've just walked through the three biggest drivers of disengagement on frontline teams. Now it's your turn.
Reflect: What is one thing you can do this week — one conversation, one clarification, one moment of recognition — that moves the needle for someone on your team?
Assess: On a scale of 1–10, how would your team rate their psychological safety with you right now?
Engage: Hit reply — what's the one root cause from this week's post that hit closest to home?
Ready to take this to a new level of clarity, confidence and credibility? Click here for a discovery call.
