Engagement by Design: How Leaders Shape the Experience of Work
Employee engagement in the U.S. recently hit its lowest level in a decade.
According to Gallup’a 2024 Engagement Survey, only 31% of employees are engaged at work, and 17% are actively disengaged. Engagement peaked at 36% in 2020 but has been trending downward ever since, exposing deeper issues in leadership, culture, and execution.
Engagement is often presented as something employees alone choose. But there is another side to the story: Engagement isn’t just about how staff choose to engage. It’s about how leaders choose to engage with staff.
From Measurement to Meaning
Tools like Clifton Strengths can help us see engagement differently. The Clifton Strengths framework is often introduced to an organization as a onetime “team building” event. While these are usually well-received, many more benefits can be realized when leaders take the time to really study their team’s results. In doing so, they will realize will gain a lot of insight as to what energizes their people, what drains them, and what they need to do their best work.
Clifton Strengths provides:
A language for what comes naturally to each person.
Insight into how people contribute and collaborate.
A bridge between individual purpose and organizational performance.
When leaders use this information to shape roles, goals, and recognition, strengths they will have tangible tactical tools to further the success of both the individual and the organization.
Engagement Is a Relationship, Not a Metric
Gallup’s research points to specific patterns in why engagement falls , and each has a leadership counterpart.
From Strengths to Alignment
At Work Wise Studio, Clifton Strengths is the first step in the ALIGN practice, a practical framework for translating insight into action:
Absorb: Gather insight from people and data. Listen to what’s working and what’s missing.
Legitimize: Validate that input by integrating it into leadership conversations and decisions.
Integrate: Align strengths, roles, and goals so individuals can contribute where they add the most value.
Grow: Build capability through coaching, reflection, and iteration.
Nurture: Protect progress and reinforce behaviors that sustain engagement over time.
Together, Clifton Strengths and ALIGN help organizations move from “what we know about our people” to “how we lead because of what we know.”
Engagement Challenge
Engagement Challenge: Clarity of expectations has dropped sharply
ALIGN creates shared understanding by connecting strategy, culture, and execution into clear roadmap.
Engagement Challenge: Fewer employees feel cared for or supported.
ALIGN integrates people-centered practices and ensures leaders listen deeply to staff insights.
Engagement Challenge: Development opportunities are lacking.
ALIGN strengthens capacity through leadership coaching, team development, and resilience building.
Engagement Challenge: Engagement is lowest among younger employees.
ALIGN invites diverse voices into planning, surfacing insights across generations and roles.
Engagement Challenge: Managers themselves are disengaged.
ALIGN equips managers with coaching tools that build trust and accountability.
This is where Clifton Strengths and the ALIGN framework work together.
Clifton Strengths shines a light on individual potential. ALIGN gives organizations a way to act on what they learn.
When Leaders Engage Differently, So Do Their Teams
Consider this example:
A leadership team invested in Clifton Strengths because the leader felt that his team was while his team was responsive to requests, it was more reactive than proactive, and led to wasted time, inefficient use of resources , poor communication and times of real tension.
Through the ALIGN process, the team revisited their Strengths results, not as a personality inventory, but as strategic input. They realized their collective profile was heavy on Execution and Relationship Building, but light on Strategic Thinking and Influencing
The result: Strong collaboration, excellent can-do attitude, but the work was reactive.
Once the team absorbed that insight and legitimized it in planning, they shifted how they worked. They slowed down. They did a retrospective of the previous year and identified patterns to inform practices. They used their excellent relationship building strengths to engage stakeholders in better planning. Deadlines were met without burnout. Communication improved. A year later, both client satisfaction surveys and employee engagement surveys had noticeably improved.
The change was not about working harder.
It was about working wiser.
The Next Level of Engagement
Gallup has long shown that employees who use their strengths daily are six times more likely to be engaged at work. But that insight alone does not create change. Engagement rises only when organizations build systems that recognize and use those strengths consistently.
That means:
Leaders must model curiosity and reflection, not just performance management.
Managers must connect individual strengths to team goals.
Organizations must nurture cultures that make engagement a shared responsibility.
In other words, engagement is a leadership practice.
Taking It Forward
If your organization has already invested in Clifton Strengths, you have already taken the first step toward deeper engagement.
The next step is alignment: using that knowledge to shape how you lead, communicate, and grow.
Ask yourselves:
How are we engaging with our people, not just measuring their engagement with us?
Where can we better absorb, legitimize, integrate, grow, and nurture what we have learned from our Strengths results?
When leaders listen this way, engagement stops being a survey score and becomes part of the culture where clarity, trust, and accountability fuel success.
Because engagement isn’t something we get from people. It’s something we design with them.
#EmployeeEngagement #Leadership Development #CliftonStrengths #WorkWiseStudio