Is employee engagement really improving? Not just yet.

Earlier this month, Gallup made a big splash with news that employee engagement numbers in the US had hit a record high. After 20 years of measuring this important business outcome, the percentage of engaged employees reached 35% in 2019. While that’s not a particularly impressive number, it has climbed nine percentage points since 2000.

For some, this might seem like a cause for celebration. After all, when positive metrics move up and to the right, things are going well, right? Well, sort of. As always, we have to look beneath the headline for the full story.

First of all, I have only love, praise, respect, and admiration for the Gallup organization and their amazing researchers. The work they do to help us understand our fellow humans all over the world provides enormous value and adds much-needed complexity to issues that are often oversimplified. And they have arguably the most extensive set of longitudinal data on employee engagement in the world. I often look to them for research, perspective, and guidance. Their latest book, It’s the Manager, is destined to become a classic in management literature. You should read it.

It’s not (entirely) Gallup’s fault that this headline has been misinterpreted, but let’s take a closer look at the data.

Digging into Gallup’s employee engagement data

Gallup has tracked employee engagement across a broad swath of US organizations since 2000. In…