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This guide distils insight from over 265,000 employees to help HR leaders:
The message is simple: Engagement in 2026 will be shaped less by new initiatives, and more by how work actually feels, day to day.
In 2025, employees continued to show up and share their views. Participation remains strong, with response rates holding at 75%, rising to 83% in high-performing organisations. Engagement hasn’t collapsed, but it has weakened. Overall engagement and positive emotions have dipped slightly year on year. More notably, engagement in high-performing organisations has fallen by 4 percentage points, a clear signal that even strong cultures are under sustained pressure.
This is not a crisis of commitment. It is a crisis of daily friction.
Employees are worn down by workload, inefficient systems, and the cumulative strain of doing more with less. The basics of work are draining energy faster than organisations are restoring it.
Emotionally, the workforce is mixed: 55% positive, 20% conflicted, and 25% negative. The balance hasn’t tipped yet, but risk is building beneath stable engagement scores. Six patterns are driving this shift:
Managers sit in the middle of all of this. They have absorbed more change, greater expectations and further emotional load than any other group.
Managers are under growing pressure, and many are struggling to keep up.
Gartner reports that 75% of managers feel overwhelmed by the growth in their responsibilities 73% say they lack the skills or support to lead organisational change.
Managers sit at the centre of engagement, wellbeing and performance. When they lack capacity, confidence or support, pressure quickly transfers into teams.
Headline engagement metrics remain broadly stable, but they hide two growing risks: low recognition and a widening gap between manager intent and employee experience.
Only 63% of non-managers feel recognised when they do good work. They are significantly more likely than managers to feel unappreciated, which keeps morale flat even when performance expectations are met.
There is a clear mismatch between how managers believe they are performing and how their teams experience them:
This perception gap is widening, and when it does, trust, motivation and discretionary effort are the first to erode.
Across 135 organisations and more than 265,000 employees:
When recognition is inconsistent and feedback loops are weak, employees disengage quietly. Without visibility of this gap, organisations often misdiagnose the issue and overinvest in new initiatives rather than fixing daily management habits.
So, where should you focus next? In this section we will explain some steps to prioritise to support engagement in 2026.
The strongest signal from 2025 is clear: people are exhausted by daily friction: Workload has increased, roles have stretched, and inefficient processes are draining energy. At the same time, expectations around productivity continue to rise, and this pressure will intensify in 2026.
AI has accelerated the expectation to do more with less. However, in most organisations, technology and processes are lagging behind ambition. Tools are not yet embedded well enough to deliver real efficiency gains, leaving employees to absorb the gap.
This is compounded by ongoing restructures and reduced headcount. Teams are leaner, but performance expectations and KPIs have not adjusted accordingly. For many employees, this translates into unrealistic workload and sustained pressure.
This is not only a wellbeing issue. It affects productivity, quality and your ability to deliver on transformation.
To reduce friction, protect energy and restore sustainable performance, HR leaders should prioritise the basics of how work gets done. Improving how work flows, and how managers lead day to day, delivers faster impact than launching new initiatives.
Use pulse questions to identify where workload feels unrealistic, systems slow people down, and handovers break. Go to team and role level so you fix real friction, not abstract ideas of workload.
Review meeting volume, response-time expectations and how the working week is structured. Expect leaders to model healthier norms. Protect focus time, reduce unnecessary meetings and make realistic boundaries part of everyday working.
Ask each function to identify three practical changes that would save time or reduce frustration. Track these improvements with the same rigour as larger transformation work. Small fixes, done consistently,
deliver momentum.
Give employees clear permission to change how work gets done (where it improves efficiency and quality). Enable teams to remove unnecessary steps, streamline handovers and make practical decisions locally, rather than waiting for central fixes. Local ownership reduces friction faster than top-down redesign alone.
In most organisations, AI is being used informally for basic administrative tasks, with little structured training. To move from experimentation to real productivity gains, organisations need to invest in practical, role-relevant AI training. The goal is not awareness of AI, it is confident,effective use in day-to day work.
Organisations that treat workload, patterns and friction as core infrastructure not a wellbeing side topic, will see the biggest movement in engagement and sustainable performance.
Line managers have a unique influence on engagement, stress and feelings of appreciation. Line managers are both the shock absorbers and amplifiers of your culture. They absorb pressure from above and determine how work is experienced on the ground. Many are now operating at capacity.
The line manager role has expanded significantly, but organisational design has not kept pace. Workflows, systems, technology, job scope and span of control are misaligned, and it is not sustainable.
AI has the potential to reduce administrative burden and create capacity, not to replace human leadership, but to enable it. Used well, AI can:
If managers lack capacity, energy or skill, your engagement strategy will stall regardless of how strong your messaging or benefits are. Protecting managers is no longer optional. It is foundational to engagement recovery in 2026.
To stabilise engagement, managers need clarity, capacity and practical support, not more theory.
Define the few behaviours that matter most in your context, such as presence, listening, recognition and clarity. Make these expectations explicit in role profiles and training, supported by real examples managers recognise.
Focus on short interventions that help managers deal with live issues. Use structured check-ins during change, conversation guides to spot early overload, and simple tools to turn survey results into team actions.
Make capacity a normal topic at manager level. Encourage boundaries, delegation and sustainable working, and actively discourage heroic behaviours that quietly damage teams.
Create small, trusted manager groups to share what works, test ideas and support each other. Peer connection reduces isolation and spreads good practice faster than formal programmes alone.
Use AI to remove operational load from the manager role. Review where time is spent and automate administrative tasks such as scheduling, reporting and basic analysis. The objective is simple: free managers up to focus on people, not process.
Where managers’ self-ratings differ from how teams experience them, structured 360 feedback provides a clear mirror. Used well, it creates focused development plans that target the behaviours that matter most. Avoid broad leadership programmes. Use 360 insight to drive specific, relevant change.
Organisations that strengthen manager capacity, self-awareness and peer support will improve engagement scores faster than those that rely on new processes or campaigns. Managers who feel equipped and supported are more likely to lead confidently through uncertainty, and to hold the line on healthy, sustainable working habits.
Appreciation remains one of the most powerful (and underused) levers in engagement. Inpulse data shows that employees who feel valued have an Engagement Index almost twice as high as those who feel unappreciated. Yet appreciation remains low, keeping morale flat even where performance expectations are being met.
At the same time, employees are clear on two things:
The result is quiet disengagement. People stay, but with lower energy, reduced trust and less willingness to go beyond what is required.
Morale in 2026 will be shaped by whether employees feel recognised, understand what is happening and why, and can see a credible path for growth. Where these signals are missing, engagement slowly erodes, even in otherwise stable organisations. Morale improves through consistent behaviours, not one-off initiatives.
Career confidence has weakened, not because ambition has disappeared, but because pathways feel
unclear.
Career confidence is rebuilt through transparency and credible options, not promises.
Employees will judge organisations less on statements about culture, and more on their daily experience.
Where people feel:
...engagement is far more likely to hold, even in tough external conditions.
Your data is already telling you were to focus. The challenge is turning signal into action quickly, while your leaders and managers are already stretched.
Inpulse is investing heavily in tools that make this easier. Our evolving platform includes AI driven results summaries, advanced reporting, predictive and correlative analytics, improved manager action planning, in-platform support and new workflows for one to ones and performance conversations.
These developments are designed to help you spot risks early, understand what sits behind the numbers and support managers to act with confidence.
If you would like a partner for your 2026 engagement priorities, get in touch with your Inpulse consultant or reach out to us directly to explore advisory or coaching support.
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