McLean & Company, a global HR research and advisory firm, has released its Employee Engagement Trends Report 2026, drawing on data from over 254,000 employees across 240 organizations. While overall engagement levels remained stable through 2025, the report warns that this "stability" may be a false signal of success. Several critical drivers—including compensation, career advancement, and leadership effectiveness—are failing to improve, creating a "plateau" that threatens long-term productivity and retention.
The "Stability" Trap: Overall engagement is steady, but organizations effective at employee experience are 2.3x more likely to report high productivity.
Compensation Crisis: Total compensation remains the lowest-scoring driver at just 52%, showing almost no improvement year-over-year.
Retention Risk: Career advancement lags at 58% and remains the primary reason employees choose to leave their organizations.
Siloed Workforces: Departmental collaboration has stagnated at 54%, with no measurable improvement since 2022.
Rising Stress: 40% of employees report higher job-related stress than in the previous year.
Coaching Deficit: Only 23% of leaders are rated as highly effective at coaching their direct reports.
The 2026 report underscores a growing disconnect: organizations are successfully measuring engagement but failing to strengthen the conditions that sustain it. According to the data, stable scores do not necessarily translate to strategic success unless HR leaders address the underlying "decay" in core workplace drivers.
"Employee engagement may be stable, but stability can be misleading. Without strengthening the core drivers behind engagement, organizations risk plateauing performance instead of improving it. HR leaders need to move beyond measurement and focus on targeted action." — Amanda Chaitnarine, Senior Director, HR Diagnostics at McLean & Company
To convert stable engagement into measurable business impact, the report recommends five key pillars for CHROs:
Prioritize Employee Experience: View EX as a direct lever for productivity and strategic goal achievement.
Modernize Career Pathways: Build transparent development tracks to mitigate the top driver of turnover.
Realign Total Rewards: Address the 52% satisfaction rating by aligning compensation strategies with current employee expectations.
Dissolve Silos: Improve cross-functional communication to enable better teamwork and collaboration.
Upskill Managers: Move beyond "supervision" toward "coaching" to bridge the leadership capability gap.
The report indicates a clear external competitive risk for organizations that ignore these lagging indicators. Those that proactively move from "measuring" to "acting" are 1.9x more likely to achieve their broader strategic goals. By using evidence-based research to fill these gaps, HR teams can transform a stagnant culture into one of sustained engagement and high performance.
McLean & Company is a global HR research and advisory firm and a division of Info-Tech Research Group. The firm provides evidence-based research, diagnostics, and advisory services to help HR leaders design workplaces where both employees and organizations can thrive.
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