Employee engagement action plan: lessons from 10 years of data
80% of the global workforce is disengaged.
That's not a typo. According to Gallup, eight out of ten people are just going through the motions at work. The cost? $8.8 trillion in lost productivity every year.
Most companies respond with the same broken employee engagement action plan. Run a survey. Pick a few perks. Maybe add a ping-pong table. Wait six months. Survey again. Wonder why nothing changed.
The problem runs deeper than any survey can measure. It's structural. I'll explain why in this article.
In 2016, we quit our jobs to find out what actually works. We spent the next decade visiting hundreds of organizations worldwide and built the largest open knowledge base on progressive ways of working, now reaching over 10 million people monthly.
We share everything we've learned from 10 years of research in our Masterclass on progressive organizational design
This picture shows us on one of our earlier company visits, quite a few years ago.
What we found: the most engaged organizations don't just treat people better. They organize completely differently.
What our research revealed
We traveled to companies across continents, industries, and cultures. Manufacturing plants in Spain. Healthcare providers in the Netherlands. Tech startups in California. Each had found their own path, but the patterns were unmistakable.
The organizations with genuinely engaged people shared specific structural choices. Not perks. Not benefits. Fundamental decisions about how power, information, and money flow.
They chose radical transparency over information hoarding. They picked distributed decision-making instead of concentrating it at the top. They shared profits with everyone. They gave teams real autonomy.
These weren't add-ons to traditional structures.
Why most employee engagement action plans fail
Pick any engagement guide online. They all start the same way: "Step 1: Assess current engagement levels through surveys."
That's useful for picking which symptoms to treat. But if your structure creates disengagement by design, no amount of post-survey action planning will fix it. Surveys tell you people want more recognition. So you launch a peer recognition app. Six months later, engagement hasn't budged. The real issue? Decisions affecting their work get made three levels up without their input.
Then there's the ownership problem. Walk into most companies and ask who owns employee engagement. The answer is always HR. They run the wellness programs. The team building. The recognition platforms. This framing misses the point. Engagement isn't something you manage through programs. It's what happens naturally when people have real ownership over their work.
And read through the advice competitors offer: flexible schedules, recognition programs, communication channels. Notice what's missing? No one talks about removing management layers. Or opening the books. Or implementing real profit sharing. Those changes threaten existing power structures. So companies stick to surface fixes.
That's why the 80% number has barely moved in decades.
An employee engagement action plan that targets root causes
After a decade of research, we knew what worked in theory. But theory doesn't change organizations.
That's why we co-founded Krisos with three of the best transformation people in the world. We buy traditional mid-size companies and transform them using the most powerful approach we've seen across our research: the NER approach.
We remove managers. We ditch the functional hierarchy. We create radical transparency around finances and salaries. We introduce profit sharing for all. We distribute power across the organization.
What that looks like in practice
Indaero, a Spanish aerospace company, has been going through this transformation since Krisos acquired them. Nine months in, the changes were already visible (see video below).
One former manager described it as "almost a liberation to be able to share decisions, rather than a frustration over no longer being a boss." Another said it's about unlearning how to be a boss. Instead of telling people "try this way, go over there," the instinct becomes "what would you do? How would you tackle this?"
On the shop floor, the shift is just as clear. One team member put it simply: "Your voice counts and it's important to the company. Sometimes decisions seem to take longer, but then you realize better decisions get made."
An engineer who joined the transformation said it allowed her to grow beyond her role, moving into business development because the structure no longer boxed her in.
People leave companies not because of money, one employee said, but because they can't stand how their superiors treat them. At Indaero, that dynamic is being dismantled entirely.
How to build your own employee engagement action plan
1. Start with structure, not surveys
Don't begin with "How engaged are you from 1-10?" Ask the questions that reveal structural barriers:
Who makes decisions about your daily work? Can you see the company's financial performance? Do you share in the profits your work creates? Can your team organize itself without management approval?
2. Pilot one structural change
Choose one lever. Maybe you open financial information to a department. Or give one team full autonomy. Or pilot profit sharing in one unit. Run it for six months. Document everything.
3. Measure outcomes, not sentiment
Track business results alongside engagement. Productivity. Quality. Retention. Absenteeism. If structural changes are made, both engagement and performance can improve. If only feelings change, you're back in perk territory.
4. Scale based on evidence
Use pilot results to build the case for broader change. Show the numbers. Evidence beats argument every time.
The real bottleneck
We know what works. Both from research and from practice. What's missing for a true workplace revolution is scale. That's the next challenge.
The hard part isn't convincing companies things need to change. The hard part is building a deep enough bench of people who know how to do this work well.
That's why we've teamed up with Xavier Costa and the team from Full Circle on an intensive 7-month program. Participants guide a real organization through the full shift from hierarchy to self-management, with the structures, processes, and personal development it requires.
If that's more than you're looking for right now, our Masterclass shares the same proven structures, distilled from 10 years of research.
Most employee engagement action plans accept the existing structure as given and ask how to make people feel better inside it. We think the better question is: what structures naturally create engagement?
The blueprint exists. The only question left is whether you'll use it.
