In an AI Era, Employee Engagement Requires Intentional Human Connection
After a 15-hour plane ride on her way to a security conference in North Africa, Melissa Muir developed a pulmonary embolism, resulting in a 28-day delay in Qatar before she was able to board a plane again.
“There was a moment where I have an oxygen mask on, I know I’m in an ambulance, and I can hear voices. I hear the nurses and doctors joking and laughing, and instantly I know I’m going to be fine,” says Muir, a Vancouver-based HR and security professional and consultant. “These people care about each other, and it will show up in their care for me. I could tell it was because they genuinely liked each other, enjoyed being around each other, and were committed to a shared mission.”
Even though this sort of workplace camaraderie is comforting and inspiring, commitment to your job, organization, coworkers, and workplace overall is a bit wobbly these days. A recent Gallup study concluded that only 31 percent of the U.S. workforce reported being engaged at work; globally, this figure is 20 percent. The U.S. figures are down from 2020, when 36 percent of the workforce reported feeling engaged. The study also found that 17 percent of U.S. workers were actively disengaged—meaning they were disgruntled, disloyal, and potentially working against the organization’s goals because their workplace needs were unmet.
Though the numbers have remained fairly steady since Gallup began tracking engagement statistics in 2000 (26 percent of U.S. workers were considered engaged in 2000), today’s work environment is not the same as it was 25 years ago. The biggest and most recent change? The adoption and use of artificial intelligence (AI).
While AI may boost workplace efficiency, reliance on AI can have a detrimental effect on office relationships, workplace communications, and trust in leaders—all of which impact engagement at work.
Defining Engagement
While experts may define workplace engagement differently, it is usually described as the level of emotional commitment and extra effort a worker puts into his or her job and the organization. It entails going beyond bare minimum requirements, instead pushing to help the organization succeed.
Karen Dillon, former editor of Harvard Business Review and coauthor of both The Microstress Effect and The New York Times bestseller How Will You Measure Your Life?, adds her own angle, saying, “I think it’s that your employees are motivated, they care about the work, the mission of the organization, they care about colleagues and find opportunities to learn and grow. Therefore, they bring their best selves to work. In return, they are cared for by colleagues and the organization; it’s a symbiotic relationship.”
Another way to look at engagement is “willingness to give discretionary effort,” says Dani Johnson, cofounder and principal analyst at RedThread, an HR research and advisory firm focused on strategic HR practices and technology.
Lately, Johnson says she has been having conversations with organizations about the meaning of trust, which goes hand in hand with engagement.
“Trust is eroding. We can’t trust the things we’re reading. We don’t trust employers not to lay us off. We do not trust people we’re hiring and are seeing false résumés,” she says. “Looking for trusted sources is increasingly important. Organizations trying to get ahead of it are looking for signals that they can provide to employees that they can be trusted.”
Trust in leadership is one of the top five factors that influence employee engagement, according to a Stanford University manager toolkit, based on research by Deloitte. Other factors listed were supportive management, meaningful work, a positive work environment, and growth opportunity.
Some signals of workplace engagement problems are obvious, such as outright hostility, which could indicate active disengagement as well as raise red flags as far as security concerns go. But a more subtle indicator of lack of engagement is the employee’s silence or a worker’s becoming noticeably less communicative and withdrawn, Johnson points out. Employees who are questioning whether the organization values them can disengage to protect themselves emotionally, being more guarded in what and whom they choose to engage with, she adds.
Engaged employees are motivated and they care about the work, the mission, and their colleagues, Dillon says. In return, they are cared for by their colleagues and the organization—it’s a symbiotic cycle.
When employees do not feel as if they are on the receiving end of that same care they show at work, that is where an imbalance sets in, which can lead to burnout.
Muir notes that employee engagement, connection with coworkers, and good management can be powerful indicators of workplace security, even beyond physical security measures. In fact, Gallup's employee engagement research found that organizations with the highest levels of employee engagement experience 63 percent fewer safety incidents.
Engagement can also affect whether employees speak up when they notice something concerning about a coworker. “Engagement matters to security because it is directly tied to awareness and to reporting. When engagement goes up, we see incidents go down and the reporting is going up,” Muir says. “When people feel good and supported at work and connected to colleagues, they will report early and often.”
The Tangible Impact of Employee Engagement
Engagement should matter to employers. Otherwise, it can affect significant aspects of your organization, Dillon says.
“If you don’t want constant turnover and the opportunity costs of teaching people the new job, if you want people to be productive and efficient and helping the organization to stay innovative, you should profoundly care about it. If you have high turnover, you lose institutional knowledge,” she adds.
U.S. turnover was lower in 2025 than in previous years, but the Work Institute’s 2026 Retention Report cautioned that quit rates are declining, due more to employee caution around employment opportunities and economic conditions than to improved workplace engagement. Dissatisfaction around career progression, development opportunities, and manager capability continues across industries and job levels.
“If turnover slows because employees feel cautious, not committed, the risk does not disappear. It quietly builds,” the report said. “Frustration, disengagement, and stalled expectations build quietly beneath the surface until conditions shift again.”
The report also noted that “The 2026 workforce is not defined by mass exits or economic collapse. It is defined by quiet strain.”
That strain can be costly. Gallup found that employees who are not engaged or are actively disengaged cost the U.S. economy $2 trillion every year in lost workplace productivity. Younger workers, hybrid workers, and managers have seen some of the sharpest declines in engagement since 2020.
Engagement matters to security because it is directly tied to awareness and to reporting.
Lack of engagement can also reverberate with respect to how a company is perceived in the wider world, affecting relationships with vendors or customers. Dillon adds, “Who is going to want to connect with your company for the long term if employees don’t care? No one will want to have a long-term business relationship with you if your employees are projecting the wrong company values.”
Besides a high turnover rate, one fairly obvious consequence of disengagement is employees who put in only a half-hearted effort. “If that discretionary effort is lost, particularly in critical roles, it can be very damaging to the organization,” Johnson says.
In a recent white paper, Jeffery Rhymes, PhD, a researcher at the University of Phoenix, examined how the alignment between an organization’s intended employee experience and employees’ perceptions of that experience can affect satisfaction and engagement.
“When organizational intent and employee perception are aligned, we are more likely to see trust, engagement, wellness, belonging, and career optimism,” Rhymes tells Security Management. “When they become misaligned, those outcomes can begin to deteriorate.” For example, if an employee develops new capabilities but cannot see opportunities to use those capabilities internally, he or she may begin looking externally. This echoes the findings from the 2026 Retention Report, which found that underwhelming career growth opportunities were the top reason employees quit in 2025.
Rhymes cautions that disengagement doesn’t always manifest in poor performance or an employee's departure. Someone can remain productive while becoming psychologically disconnected from the organization. He notes that leaders should avoid treating disengagement as an individual employee problem.
“Before asking what is wrong with the employee,” he says, “leaders should ask what the employee may be experiencing that the organization is not seeing.”
AI: Your New Coworker
AI is changing how people work, communicate, solve problems, learn, and garner information. Of course, AI in the workplace can be a great time-saver: It can shorten or take over mundane tasks and overall can alleviate some of the stress from work. But it can also undercut some of the collaborative, human aspects of work.
A 2026 study by MyIQ found that 74 percent of employees turn to AI chatbots to answer questions rather than their coworkers. While that can be convenient, it lessens human interaction and escalates loneliness. The study also found that 48 percent of workers said spontaneous conversations throughout the working day had become less frequent.
“AI does not just remove a question from a colleague’s inbox,” said MyIQ managing director Sarah Meyer in a press release about the report. “It removes the moment in which one person sees how another person thinks. Repeated across a working week, those missing exchanges can mean fewer opportunities to build trust, share judgment, and become known inside a team.”
AI is no substitute for human interaction. In her book The Microstress Effect, Dillon explained the scaffolding effect: When colleagues work together, they can build on each other’s ideas. Through this collaborative process, they can produce “incidental sparks of creativity.” Thus, while AI can make work more efficient, it’s the interactions with other humans that make work more meaningful, she says.
Dillon says leaders should make it clear that AI is meant to help employees understand things better, not to replace their thinking. She points to an unexpected downside: In one organization, AI had taken so many mundane tasks off employees’ plates that they no longer had small mental breaks throughout the workday. The result was that the work was becoming draining, as AI was removing those “palate cleansers.”
All this isn’t to say that AI should be considered the scapegoat for disengagement at work. The way that AI is introduced and integrated into the workplace is significant. In a July 2026 Gallup article, researcher Jim Harter said, “Employees are substantially more likely to be engaged when leaders introduce AI with clear expectations, a thoughtful implementation plan, and active manager support.”
Overall, worker engagement is higher in companies that use AI, Gallup found, but leadership matters. In companies that provide a clear plan for integrating AI, engagement rates experience a notable jump. Significantly, “Employees who say their manager actively supports their team’s use of AI have an engagement rate of 48 percent, compared with 30 percent among employees who do not say this—an 18-point difference,” Harter wrote.
Rhymes adds that AI can actually strengthen engagement, particularly when organizations use it to expand employee’s capabilities rather than viewing it narrowly as a productivity tool. He also says that one of the more surprising things he has learned from his research is that “AI may be changing employees faster than it changes organizations.” As employees use AI to build skills and capabilities independently, their expectations of what they can accomplish and what their organizations should provide may change as well.
“We frequently talk about organizations adopting AI, but employees are adopting it as well,” Rhymes says. “They are learning independently, increasing their capabilities, gaining confidence, and discovering possibilities that may extend beyond their current roles or organizations. That caused me to think differently about engagement. The question may no longer simply be, ‘Are employees satisfied with what the organization provides?’ Increasingly, leaders may also need to ask, ‘Does what our organization provides align with what employees now believe they are capable of becoming?’ ”
Encouraging Human Engagement
Responsibility for encouraging engagement in the workforce starts at the top and ideally should come from the C-suite, Dillon says. “Being connected as a CEO and talking to people at all levels of the organization: That goes a long way.”
While employees can take ownership by self-advocating, building relationships, and bringing their best selves to work, managers also play a critical role to bridge the gap between the C-suite and the rest of the staff. However, managers have not necessarily been equipped to simultaneously handle current workloads and foster engagement across the organization.
“We’ve promoted managers for their technical skills but have failed to give them people skills and are shocked when they don’t exercise people management skills,” Muir says. “They’re avoiding hard conversations because they don’t have the tools. People would fire someone before having a difficult conversation. What if we taught people how to give someone a meaningful compliment?” That skill, she argues, will make having difficult conversations easier.
A meaningful compliment includes a broader sense of acknowledgement, whether in an email, a public shout-out, or a private check-in. It requires intentional presence, noticing specific things about the person and his or her actions. Muir recommends trying a three-part model: I heard you say A; I see that you B; and that tells me, that’s the kind of thing, or no wonder C. For example, “I heard you say you stayed late to help a new employee find a file. I see that you notice when people are struggling, even when it’s not your job. That tells me that people feel safe asking you for help.”
This detailed and nuanced feedback earns trust and respect from employees—social credit that works in managers’ favor when they need to have difficult conversations.
However, managers can unintentionally undermine engagement in the workplace when they continually add priorities and tasks without removing others. Dillon calls this “the culture of and.” This workload overload can overwhelm workers and cause them to lose trust in their managers, especially if those managers seem oblivious to the burden on their teams.
In an era of remote or hybrid work, with people working in isolation or even scattered across the globe in different offices, it is easy to become disconnected from coworkers. Video calls provide little opportunity for casual water cooler talk, so calls where leaders make an effort to start with some basic office or personal chitchat could really make a difference by fostering a sense of connection.
Fostering engagement among coworkers does not have to be complicated. For example, Muir argues that even something as ordinary as eating together can help, pointing to shared meals and breakroom conversations as simple ways employers could create more opportunities for employees to interact informally. Even check-in conversations between managers and employees over coffee go a long way toward establishing trust.
Johnson says that she has not seen her RedThread business partner in months. They make it work with a remote team, but it requires intention. “We spend time in meetings talking about our lives and asking people how they are,” she says. “It has to be deliberate in order to compensate for the fact that you’re not standing around the water cooler.”
Viewing employees as real humans with real lives outside of work can go a long way. “I think you can underestimate the value of regularly checking in with employees and making them feel heard,” Dillon says. “Have a conversation. Let people be part of the problem-solving as opposed to simply asking more and more of them. I think if people feel like you have their back, they will give you their best.”
To become a better engagement leader, Muir says, “Active listening is 99 percent of it; be a good listener and be vulnerable. If I have humility and vulnerability and I listen, everything else is going to get better.”
Still, Rhymes adds a note of caution: “Feedback gives employees a voice. Trust makes that voice honest. Opportunity gives employees a reason to stay. The important leadership responsibility is connecting all three. Listening without action can eventually become another source of misalignment.”
Hilary Daninhirsch is an award-winning lifestyle and B2B freelance writer based in Pittsburgh. She is married and is the mother of two young adult daughters as well as a vocal rescue dog.
