Published: May 13, 2026 | HR Leadership Weekly
For years, employee engagement has been the primary way to gauge the health and happiness of a workforce. Companies track it closely. Leaders talk about it often. Entire strategies are built around improving it. The assumption was simple: If employees are engaged, they’re more likely to stay.
But new data from Firstup, a leading platform for intelligent workforce communication, suggests that assumption may be wrong — and the discrepancy is a critical problem for HR technology leaders to address.
The Data That Changed Everything
Firstup surveyed more than 3,000 corporate office workers, hourly employees, and managers of hourly employees across the U.S. and Canada for its “The State of Employee Engagement in North America” report. The findings were striking:
- 43% of corporate office workers reported being engaged — and also anticipated leaving their jobs within the next year.
- 40% of hourly employees were engaged — and expected to leave within 12 months.
- 46% of managers reported engagement — and planned to depart.
Across every group, the pattern was the same: high self-reported engagement, high intent to leave. The engagement metric was looking right on paper. Retention was heading the wrong way.
Why Engagement Can Be Misleading
The problem, according to Firstup’s Chief People Officer Sabra Sciolaro, is that engagement surveys measure how employees feel at a particular moment — not how work and culture actually feel on a day-to-day basis.
“It’s easy for employees to self-report a high level of engagement,” Sciolaro noted. “They know what being engaged is supposed to look like: showing up to meetings, responding quickly, participating in surveys, and expressing alignment with company goals. But those activities don’t necessarily mean employees feel their work is clear, manageable, or sustainable.”
In other words, an employee can be engaged — responsive, participative, cooperative — and still be overwhelmed by the friction around how work actually gets done. They can love the job and hate the chaos. They can care deeply about their work while quietly becoming exhausted by constant updates, shifting priorities, and information gaps.
Over time, that friction-driven fatigue drives people out — even the engaged ones.
Clarity, Change Management, and Consistency
So what should leaders be paying attention to instead? According to Firstup’s research, three signals are far more predictive of retention than traditional engagement scores:
1. Clarity. Do employees get the information they need to do their jobs in a clear, direct, and timely manner? When people feel informed, they make better decisions and feel more connected to the company’s priorities. Firstup’s data found that between 61% and 67% of employees — depending on their role — reported missing important updates about policies or procedures. The result: more time chasing down answers, repeating work, and making decisions without full context.
2. Change Management. Organizations are constantly evolving with new tools, strategies, and expectations. But do employees understand what’s changing and what it means for their role? Without clear communication, uncertainty grows quickly.
3. Consistency. Is the employee experience the same across roles and locations, or are some groups routinely left out? Gaps in communication tend to show up at the edges of the organization first — and they correlate with higher turnover. This is especially true for frontline, deskless employees.
“These signals are more difficult to measure than engagement scores, but they’re far more predictive of retention,” Sciolaro said.
The Manager Problem
The clarity problem hits managers hardest. People leaders are expected to translate strategy into day-to-day execution, answer questions, and keep teams aligned — all while navigating the same information gaps themselves. In many organizations, managers have effectively become the “last mile” of communication.
But they’re often doing it without the systems or support needed to be consistent. When communication breaks down, managers try to fill the gaps — even when they don’t have the answers. That mismatch creates pressure, contributes to burnout, and feeds turnover on both sides.
The data backs this up: Gallup’s “State of the Global Workplace 2026” report shows managers experiencing the lowest levels of engagement in years.
What This Means for HR Tech
For HR technology companies, the engagement-to-retention disconnect is both a challenge and an opportunity. The opportunity is that it opens the door for new measurement approaches — platforms that track clarity, change adoption, and consistency alongside or instead of engagement. Firstup’s own platform, which focuses on workforce communication and ensures employees get the right information at the right time, is directly positioned around this insight.
But it also means HR leaders need to rethink what they measure. Engagement surveys are still valuable. They tell you how employees feel. But if you’re using engagement as a leading indicator of retention, you may be looking at the wrong signal.
The companies that figure this out in 2026 will be the ones that treat communication and clarity as core operational metrics — not just nice-to-have cultural initiatives.
Sources:
- Firstup, “The State of Employee Engagement in North America,” 2026, https://cdn.sanity.io/files/3magj8ni/production/ad952476dbfeb3a68f3e47b35b7e307885c2f666.pdf
- Forbes Human Resources Council, “Employee Engagement Doesn’t Predict Retention Anymore” by Sabra Sciolaro, June 4, 2026, https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbeshumanresourcescouncil/2026/06/04/employee-engagement-doesnt-predict-retention-anymore/
- Gallup, “State of the Global Workplace 2026,” https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx
- Firstup, https://firstup.io/
- Firstup, “Navigating the Perfect Storm” report, https://cdn.sanity.io/files/3magj8ni/production/ff0d8797fb46d63f0e47f307eefc7c788eebd329.pdf