Everyone’s Worried About Engagement. Here’s What I See in the Room

If you lead a large organization, you’ve probably heard the numbers.
Global engagement is slipping — only about 1 in 5 employees are truly engaged, and managers, who hold the biggest lever for team engagement, are even less engaged themselves (Gallup, 2025). That’s a scary thought.

But here’s what I notice when I work with teams: the stats aren’t abstract. You can see them. You can feel them.

• People hold back in meetings.

• Energy drops when a “new initiative” is introduced.

• Managers want to help their people grow, but they’re buried in admin and firefighting.

• And often, nobody feels it’s really safe to speak openly — so they don’t.

I’ve seen global companies invest millions in new structures, strategies, and systems — only to watch them stall because the human side wasn’t engaged.

Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index reports employees face 275 interruptions per day and that 80% don’t have the time or energy to do their jobs well. At the same time, Deloitte found that managers spend 40% of their time putting out fires and only 13% developing their people. It’s no wonder engagement feels out of reach.

And here’s the kicker: we can’t fix disengagement by telling people to be engaged. We can’t make them feel safe by saying “it’s safe here.”

Because engagement isn’t an instruction.
It’s a feeling.

The best part of my job is watching the moment a team shifts:

👉 When someone takes a risk in an exercise, the room goes quiet for a second — and then bursts into laughter and support.
👉 When a manager realizes they can create clarity and trust not by controlling more, but by letting go a little.
👉 When people experience what it feels like to have each other’s backs — and say out loud, “I wish work felt more like this.”

That’s not theory. That’s not a bullet point on a PowerPoint slide. That’s engagement being practiced and lived. And once a team has felt it, they can recreate it in their daily work.

We saw this first-hand with Beiersdorf’s Early Innovation team. They joined our 5 Guiding Principles Masterclass in Improv, and after the training, they didn’t just walk away with new tools. They achieved the highest engagement scores across the company. Why? Because they had felt psychological safety and collaboration in the room, and they could carry it back into their daily work.

I’ve seen too many workshops where engagement is explained, not experienced. Slides full of theory, lists of “top 5 ways to motivate people.” Everyone nods politely, then goes back to business as usual.

But when we work with applied improv, the room changes. It’s not passive — it’s active, embodied, memorable. People don’t just know what psychological safety means; they’ve felt it.

And when you’ve felt it, you can’t unfeel it.

If you’re leading a large organization right now, I’d invite you to reflect:

• How much of your engagement work is informational — and how much is experiential?

• How often do your managers get to practice creating trust, not just hear about it?

• And how would it feel if your people left a workshop buzzing with energy, connection, and concrete ways to bring that back to their teams?

That’s exactly what we design at IMPROV Communication: active learning that transforms engagement from a concept into a lived experience.

And if you’re looking at team development in the next 1–6 months, let’s talk. We’d love to help your people not just hear about engagement. Because we both know now, that wont stick. We will help them actually feel it.

At IMPROV we work with global organisations training teams in Psychological Safety, Innovation Collaboration and Leadership development using the 5 Guiding Principles of IMPROV