Employee engagement is an employee’s involvement and enthusiasm for the work they do. To evaluate engagement, we might ask employees whether they have opportunities to learn new skills, whether they feel their work is meaningful, and whether interactions with coworkers and supervisors are rewarding. Highly engaged employees have a passion for their work and feel a deep connection to their companies; disengaged employees have essentially checked out, putting time but not energy or attention into their work.

Engagement becomes a real concern for most organizations because surveys indicate that few employees—between 17 percent and 29 percent—are highly engaged by their work. Reviews of the research on employee engagement suggest that employee engagement is moderately related to employee and organizational performance. Such promising findings have earned employee engagement a following in many organizations. However, the concept generates active debate about its usefulness, partly because of the difficulty of separating it from related constructs.

For example, some note that employee engagement has been used to refer at different times to a variety of different organizational phenomena, including psychological states, personality traits, and behaviors. For the most part, research suggests that employee engagement predicts important outcomes.