22nd June 2026
Employee Engagement Is Falling: Why Workplace Systems Are Failing Employees
Global employee engagement has fallen to 20%, revealing a deeper workplace challenge. The article argues that disengagement is not caused by employee attitudes but by organisational systems that fail to create psychological safety, trust and support. Sustainable performance comes from fixing workplace conditions rather than expecting individuals to simply work harder.
This article was written by Aparna Rae and published in Forbes.
The job market is frozen. Nobody’s going anywhere. And somehow, that has not made things better.
For years, the talent conversation revolved around the fear of losing employees and the cost of attrition. Build a great culture or lose people. Today, with little movement in the job market, attrition has dropped, making visible a culture problem. Yes, everyone stayed – and most people stopped caring.
Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report found that global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, its lowest level since 2020. That means 80% of the global workforce is disengaged and the financial consequences are no longer abstract. Gallup estimates the decline is costing the world economy an estimated $10 trillion in lost productivity. Gen Z and millennials call it quiet quitting. Researchers are calling it the Great Detachment. Whatever you call it, it is now the default state of most workforces.
Aoife O’Brien, organizational behaviorist, host of the Happier at Work podcast, and author of the new book Thriving Talent: How Great Leaders Drive Performance, Engagement, and Retention, has spent years watching these patterns repeat themselves. And she’s tired of it.
“What’s missing isn’t effort,” O’Brien told me. “Most leaders genuinely want to do better. What’s missing is a diagnosis of the actual problem.”
O’Brien’s book, published this year, offers something the talent conversation has missed: a true evidence-based, systems-level framework for understanding why people fail to thrive at work and what to actually do about it – not quick fixes, but longer-term investments. This book is not a wellness manifesto or a listicle in disguise. Thriving Talent is structured around five interdependent elements – psychological safety, workplace culture, employee drivers, capabilities, and leadership – and makes a compelling case that most organizations are addressing symptoms while leaving root causes untouched.
The Foundation Nobody’s Actually Built
When asked, leaders say they’ve largely succeeded at creating psychological safety on their teams.
In reality, they have not.
O’Brien has a lot of empathy for leaders and people managers. Psychological safety is the belief that you can speak up, take risks, and surface problems without fear of punishment or humiliation. It’s neither the absence of screaming, nor the presence of warm and fuzzy feelings. It’s a highly measurable condition that most workplaces haven’t come close to establishing — and the condition that everything else in the talent conversation is built on top of. Without it, engagement initiatives feel performative, feedback loops are broken, and the most capable people quietly disengage.
She says, “Psychological safety can be as simple as a manager admitting to a mistake or saying ‘I don’t know,’ a junior person feeling safe enough to share an idea in a team meeting, or flagging issues early before they become catastrophic. Most leaders believe that psychological safety is about feeling comfortable; but safety and comfort should not be conflated. We can still feel uncomfortable having those difficult conversations that need to be had – but we feel safe to do so.”
Fixing People vs. Fixing Systems
This distinction between personalities and structural conditions is what sets Thriving Talent apart from the heap of leadership books that essentially amount to “have you tried being more resilient?”In our conversation, O’Brien outlined a scenario we’re all familiar with: identify the underperforming or disengaged employee, send them to a training, or offer an EAP. This highly individualistic approach treats any misalignment between a person and their environment as a personal failing instead of an organizational design problem.The result is also familiar: employees feel blamed for conditions they did not create, and leaders are confused when nothing changes.
It’s worth noting here that since 2022, engagement among managers has fallen by 9% points. The people responsible for creating conditions for everyone else are themselves checked out. That’s not a workforce attitude problem. That’s a structural design failure.
O’Brien’s framework inverts this. Instead of asking “what’s wrong with this person?” she’s asking “what’s wrong with the system this person is operating in?” Values alignment, clear expectations, leadership behaviors, recognition structures – these are the variables that actually determine whether talent thrives or quietly burns out.
“Burnout happens when organisations try to save money by not investing in people, but end up paying for the consequences,” O’Brien writes. The ROI math here, she’s careful to note, is not soft. Estimates put the cost of burnout at somewhere between $4,000 and $21,000 per employee per year, with the average 1,000-person company losing over $5 million annually. That’s not simply a culture problem. That impacts a company’s balance sheet.
Read this article in full here: Employee Engagement Keeps Falling. The Problem Isn’t People — It’s Organizational Systems.
