Why is Employee Engagement Important?

What Is Employee Engagement?

Employee engagement is the intellectual, creative, emotional, and physical commitment an employee makes to their firm. Low employee engagement cost the global economy an estimated $10 trillion in lost productivity in 2025, equal to about 9% of global GDP (Gallup).

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Why is Employee Engagement Important?

Firms that fail to maintain high employee engagement face unexpected problems. 

1. Firms with low employee engagement experience less revenue growth.

   • Disengaged employees are less likely to reach stretch goals that result in higher revenue growth.  Instead, they will do just enough to be better than the worst performer.  A disengaged employee may have the talent to create revenue that exceeds your expectations, but instead they produce average or slightly below average results.

   • 19% of CFOs said slower top-line growth was one of their biggest challenges for enterprise performance in 2025. Gartner’s finance survey found that slower top-line growth was the top concern, alongside talent issues (Gartner).

2. Firms with less employee engagement have more HR violations.

   • Disengaged employees are more likely to cause and be the target of HR violations.  Disengaged employees who are more likely to feel resentment and act offensively toward the employees who are committed intellectually, creatively, emotionally, and physically to the success of the firm.  These offensive actions result in higher numbers of HR violations and complaints. 

   • Disengaged employees are less productive.  This causes frustration that results in conflict between employees.  A disengaged employee is more likely to escalate the conflict and report an HR violation instead of working to resolve the conflict in a manner that increases productivity. 

   • The EEOC processed 88,201 new discrimination charges in fiscal year 2025 and responded to nearly 270,000 inquiries, up almost 9% from fiscal year 2024 (EEOC).

3. Firms with lower employee engagement have higher turnover and experience "brain drain" of exceptional talent.

   • Disengaged employees who get promoted or maintain management positions create an unproductive work environment for those who they supervise, their peers with whom they collaborate, and the leaders to whom they report.   

   • This unproductive environment de-motivates exceptional talent who love to use their talents to drive success of their firm. Exceptional talent will leave.

   • 42% of employees who voluntarily left their organization said their manager or organization could have done something to prevent them from leaving (Gallup).

4. Firms with low employee engagement have higher overhead costs due to waste, fraud, and abuse.

   • Disengaged employees are not likely to initiate, fix, or develop programs that will increase the efficiency of all of the teams at a firm.  When new initiatives, aimed at increasing efficiency, are introduced by leadership disengaged employees are not likely to contribute in any meaningful to the success of the initiative. 

   • If a firm has a critical mass of disengaged employees, it will be nearly impossible for a firm to generate higher profits by improving efficiency. 

   • 15% of CFOs cited rising costs as a major challenge to enterprise performance in 2025, according to Gartner’s CFO survey (Gartner).

5. Firms with lower employee engagement struggle with low adoption of leadership initiatives.

   • Disengaged employees are not likely to support any leadership initiative if it will cause an impact on their current workflow. 

   • Disengaged employees will be the first to say why something will not work, without providing a solution to enable the initiative to be successful.  Disengaged employees will influence others to not support the new leadership initiative.  This results in lower effectiveness of leaders and managers across the firm. 

   • Gartner found that only 32% of mid-to-senior-level business leaders said the last change they led achieved healthy change adoption by employees (Gartner).

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 Act Today

Do you see signs that your organization is experiencing low employee engagement? 

Launch an initiative to increase engagement before the signs become issues that turn into major problems. 

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Meet The Author

• Kenneth Bowman is a former U.S. Air Force space officer, USAF Academy graduate, former Big 4 technology consultant, and a top corporate keynote speaker on leadership, teamwork, resilience, and productivity.