Most large organizations run engagement programs. They survey employees annually, review the scores, and commission initiatives to address the gaps. Engagement has been a strategic priority in most of these organizations for a decade or more. Globally, only 23% of employees are engaged at work — a figure that has barely moved despite all of it. Something is systematically not working, and the research points toward a specific explanation: the programs that are designed to create engagement are often structured in a way that cannot produce it.
The distinction that matters is between three fundamentally different kinds of involvement. Informing employees about strategy is not engagement. Consulting them — gathering their input after the direction has been set — is not engagement. Co-creating the strategy with them — including them in the deliberation over trade-offs before the decisions are made — is engagement in the sense that produces the psychological ownership that converts strategy into committed action. Most engagement programs are designed around the first two. None of them produce the third.
The communication data that explains the gap
This gradient deserves more attention than most organizations give it. The difference between a workforce where 80% of people understand how their work connects to the strategy and one where 9% do is not a communications problem solvable by a better all-hands presentation or a more readable strategy document. It is a structural problem: the people responsible for execution were not part of building the thing they are being asked to execute.
The BTS and EIU research identifies a second finding that compounds the first. The effect of direct manager engagement — the 80% figure — is significantly amplified when that engagement includes genuine peer collaboration on strategy development. Regular collaboration with colleagues outside one's immediate business unit in building the strategy produces strong commitment levels at every organizational level, with the most pronounced effect at the senior level. The people who built it together are the people most likely to execute it together.
The consultation theater problem
The reason most engagement programs fail to produce ownership is structural rather than intentional. The typical design sequence is: leadership develops strategy, then conducts employee consultation, then launches communication campaign, then measures engagement. The consultation phase produces genuine input. But by the time it occurs, the major strategic choices have already been framed — often already decided — and the input is being gathered about implementation details rather than the direction itself.
Employees recognize this. The gap between being asked for input and being asked to shape the decision is one that people in organizations navigate constantly, and they are accurate judges of which side of it they are on. Input that does not visibly influence a decision teaches employees that engagement is a ritual, not a mechanism. Each consultation cycle that produces no traceable change in the strategy reduces the credibility of the next one.
The audit that reveals whether engagement is real
The most useful diagnostic for any engagement program is a simple structural question: at which stage does employee input actually influence a strategic choice, rather than being gathered after the choice has been made? If the honest answer is "it doesn't" — if the consultation is genuinely downstream of the decision — then the program is measuring something real but producing something different from what the design intends.
Closing that gap requires redesigning the process, not the communication. It means identifying at least one high-stakes strategic moment per year where the perspectives of implementation leads and frontline managers genuinely shape the options under consideration before any are selected. It means closing the feedback loop explicitly: when input influences a decision, naming specifically how. When it does not, explaining why. The difference between consultation theater and genuine co-creation is not hard to perceive from inside the organization. The research is unambiguous about which one produces the ownership that makes strategy move.