Sustainability Infrastructure

Fewer Americans ‘actively engaged’ at work: Gallup

Engagement rates among workers took a hit at the beginning of the pandemic and continue to decline.
Close-up Of Two Businesspeople Hand With Document On Desk. (iStock)

Story at a glance


  • A new Gallup poll found that U.S. employee engagement has dropped again.  

  • Now, 32 percent of full-time and part-time employees report being engaged at work while 18 percent admit to being actively disengaged.  

  • That engagement rate is 4 percentage points lower than in 2020.  

U.S. employee engagement in the workplace has dropped again, according to a new Gallup poll.  

Findings of the 15,000-person poll show that the rate of workers fully engaged at work has dipped to 32 percent, with 18 percent admitting to being actively disengaged at their job.  

Worker engagement dropped for the first time in a decade back in 2020, falling to 36 percent. Since then, engagement has continued to decline with worker engagement dipping to 34 percent in 2021.  


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Now, the ratio of engaged to actively disengaged workers in the country is 1.8-to-1, the lowest it has been since 2013.  

Younger workers are more likely to be disengaged at work compared to older workers, poll findings show.

Engagement among workers 35 years old and younger has gone down by 4 percentage points since prior to the pandemic. Meanwhile, engagement among workers ages 35 and older has only dropped by 2 percentage points.  

Younger workers also reported feeling less cared about at work and that their opinions mattered less than older workers, the poll found.  

Women have suffered a greater decline in work-related engagement than men. Since 2019, engagement among women has declined by four percentage points while it has only gone down by 1 percentage point among men.  

The group that has experienced the largest decline in employee engagement are those that are in remote-ready jobs that continue to work fully on-site, according to Gallup.  

Engagement among those workers has fallen by 5 percentage points and active disengagement has shot up by seven percentage points since 2019.  


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