Roughly Half of Employees Are Quietly Checked Out. Here's What to Do About It.
Key Highlights
- Transforming disengaged employees involves building trust, creating a safe environment for sharing ideas, and fostering a sense of ownership.
- Leadership plays a crucial role by modeling humility, being approachable and promoting transparency to develop trust and engagement.
- Creating a psychologically safe workplace encourages employees to express difficulties and share ideas without fear of retribution.
- Addressing engagement issues requires ongoing, evergreen efforts focused on recognition, appreciation and cultivating a culture where everyone feels invested.
The struggle with employee engagement is a tale as old as time: Some people relish what they do at work, some care less but still get their job done, and others sow discord.
Employee engagement is as important as ever. With an uncertain market environment, persistent inflation and AI reshaping the workplace, businesses need employees who bring creative energy and enthusiasm to their roles, are invested in where they’re at and help the company succeed.
Yet fewer than one-third (31%) of people were engaged in their jobs last year, according to a 2025 Gallup poll. Of the nearly 79,000 full- or part-time U.S. employees who responded to the query, more than half (52%) were disengaged. Nearly one in five people (17%) were actively disengaged.
Engagement slipped the most among millennials and Gen Z employees since 2020 — the high-water mark over the last 25 years — making way for the “quiet quitting” and “the Great Resignation” trends that followed.
Since 2020, fewer millennials and Gen Z employees have felt cared about at work, believed they have had opportunities to learn and grow, or believed someone at work is encouraging their development, according to Gallup.
It's up to leaders to shift those metrics, said Greg Hawks, a corporate culture specialist and author of the forthcoming book, “Act Like an Owner: Five Unlocks for Creating Culture People Love and Results Leaders Need.” Note that he said this is not a short-term fix, but it’s worth it.
“It’s an evergreen effort, because the data says when people are engaged, the results are significantly better, consistently,” Hawks said. “People want to be engaged where they're appreciated, where they're recognized."
The secret sauce is to remove the most actively disengaged employees from your teams and create an environment where others can grow, Hawks said.
Owners, renters and vandals
Gallup’s poll divides employees into three categories: the engaged, the disengaged and the actively disengaged. Hawks characterizes these groups like he would someone he could rent a home to:
- The engaged are like people who want to own the home they’re leasing; they care about the space they’re in, and come in enthused and with ideas for adding value.
- The disengaged act like renters who are uninvested. They may have started out as owners, but now they’re checked out. They show up on time, do their job well, help the company meet its goals, but are uninterested in putting in extra effort.
- The actively disengaged are akin to vandals, like the frat guys you rent a house to who trash the place by the time they’re done. They spread negativity, are difficult, gossip or are out for themselves.
First step: Rid your team of vandals
The overall strategy to improve engagement is to convert “renters” into “owners.” But first, you need to evict the “vandals” from your team.
Actively disengaged employees create division, foster toxic cultures, sow discord and resist progress. Keeping these employees communicates to the renters that the vandals’ behavior is permissible.
Removing actively disengaged employees can be difficult. After all, vandals have been allowed to stay for a reason, often because they are good revenue producers, have been at the company forever, or hold their jobs through nepotism and show up with some level of immunity.
Next step: Turn renters into owners
Once the vandals are gone, the key is to build trust and a pathway for disengaged employees, i.e., renters, to buy back in, feel free to use their imagination and care again.
Renters get a bad rap, said Hawks. They likely started out engaged, creative and eager to prove they were a good hire. But at some point along the way, they found the environment wasn’t safe for them to share their creative ideas or their ideas weren’t heard. They aren’t causing trouble, but they’re not putting in the extra effort, either.
The key is to build trust. Most organizations or teams haven’t fostered an environment where everyone trusts each other enough to address problems directly, “so they dance around it,” said Hawks.
“Do we create an environment where we can openly share, be transparent, express our ideas, receive feedback and know that we all really have each other's best interests in mind? Because that's really the greatest hindrance to forward progress, is thin trust,” he said.
Building Trust
Employees need to feel psychologically safe in sharing difficulties without retribution. Part of that means leaders need to be approachable.
Because employees have experienced retribution or adverse consequences for expressing difficulties or disagreement, leading to an unwillingness to disagree or even to share opinions that are not kind of status quo, Hawks said.
Hawks suggests that leaders create an environment of trust by modeling humility without fear of retribution, so employees feel more comfortable being honest. He suggests pulling back the curtain about the work challenges you’re facing.
For instance, if innovation is a value, you can share how you feel you haven’t innovated anything in the past week. This models humility without fear of retribution and creates an environment where employees can feel more comfortable being honest.
Ask yourself:
- How can you create an environment where people can rise up in?
- Why wouldn’t someone trust you?
- What can you do about that?
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About the Author
Andrea Zelinski
Contributor
Andrea Zelinski is an award-winning freelance journalist with a passion for translating complex issues, trends and strategies into clear, engaging content to help people improve their businesses and their lives.
She spent 15 years as a political reporter covering state governments in Illinois, Tennessee and Texas, reporting from the halls of state capitols for publications including Texas Monthly, the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News. In 2021, she shifted her focus to business journalism, joining Travel Weekly as senior cruise editor, where she covered the travel industry’s recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.
When not reporting, Andrea is probably hiking. Known for embracing ambitious challenges, she hiked the entire Appalachian Trail in 2020 and the Pacific Crest Trail in 2025.
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