2025 is coming to a close. Which means it’s time to explore what happened over the past year and what’s on the rise in terms of employee engagement trends for 2026.
Some emerging trends may seem surprising, but when you dig into the data it makes a lot of sense.
So, without further ado, here’s what to watch out for when it comes to employee engagement trends in 2026:
DEI
Yes, despite all the backlash at the start of 2025, DEI still matters. It’s a key differentiator for businesses looking to hire the best talent and it still leads to better business outcomes.
Diverse businesses earn 2.5x the cash flow of their less-diverse competitors, and diverse teams are 35% more productive.
This is because having diversity on your teams fosters diversity of ideas. This also comes with a side of creativity, innovation, and enhanced problem-solving. So it should come as no surprise that this remains one of the employee engagement trends for 2026.
Belonging
91% of employees who feel like they belong at work are engaged. This is compared to a measly 20% of those who feel like they don’t belong.
Creating a sense of belonging is more challenging when you have a remote or hybrid workforce, but it isn’t impossible.
Tools like Workrowd help you connect employees with each other. At the same time, leaders who have a remote-first attitude and look for ways to foster inclusivity regardless of where someone works will create an environment that’s more appealing to everyone.
Employee groups
Employee groups are one of the most powerful ways to support your team members. They enable employees to connect with colleagues from similar backgrounds and experiences.
When they’re well-run, they’re not just great for networking. These communities can also support employee career progression and business growth. Which explains why they’re high on the list of employee engagement trends for 2026.
Learning and development
Not everyone wants to progress through traditional career paths. This is particularly true for younger generations. They’ve noticed that Millennials were promised they could have everything if they just worked hard enough, only to experience wage stagnation.
What’s the point of working hard if the financial rewards never come?
That doesn’t mean anyone wants to feel stuck, though. Your people still want to learn and grow.
There are lots of ways you can support your employee learning and development. From employee groups to development days, to coaching and mentoring, helping your team learn new skills is among the most important employee engagement trends for 2026.
Internal progression and mobility
As I’ve mentioned, not everyone wants to progress in their careers in a traditional way. If your employees enjoy working for you and want to stay, offering different progression opportunities could be the best way to retain your top talent and internal knowledge.
It doesn’t have to be through traditional employee to manager career paths, either.
You could offer other options such as the ability to move into a different role in another department. Or, they could become a subject matter expert within their current area.
Several people I know have successfully moved from one department to another. The took their transferable soft skills and growth mindsets with them. It better played to their strengths, making them happier at work and enabling them to grow faster.
So many skills are transferable. From marketing to sales, or QA to development and beyond. Unfortunately that seems to be less and less appreciated.
But it’s often our external experiences and soft skills that lead to the greatest innovations. It can also identify gaps that you might not otherwise have noticed.
Ensuring your team members are positioned to stay with you long-term not only boosts retention but is central to the employee engagement trends for 2026.
Bringing back the human touch (with AI’s help)
AI and technology’s greatest strength is streamlining the boring tasks no one wants to do.
By streamlining those, it allows you to spend more time on human tasks like providing candidates with feedback after an interview, or solving employee issues. AI is top of mind for many people, so it certainly takes a place on the list of employee engagement trends for 2026.
Taking a proactive approach
So much of HR can be reactive. With the increased use of AI and other technologies though, it’s easier than ever for you to take a proactive approach instead.
For example, if you’re hiring for a new role, instead of posting to job boards and hoping for the best, you could get hiring managers to call several of their contacts to see if they, or someone they know, might be interested.
This leads to candidates coming in at a higher stage of awareness than someone who’s applied via a job board. It can therefore lead to greater success in your hiring efforts.
Likewise, when it comes to solving employee challenges, actively sending regular feedback surveys can help you spot challenges before they become something that’s harder to fix.
Using Workrowd, you can automate your employee feedback surveys and track the results in real-time with your easy-to-read dashboards. Giving you more time to act on the findings instead of having to administer the survey and wade through the data yourself.
Bridging the generational divide
“They’re so lazy! They have no work ethic!”
Sound familiar?
It’s now a common refrain against Gen Z, but older generations said the exact same thing about Millennials in the 2000s and 2010s.
Now Millennials are the burnout generation.
Millennials and Gen Z-ers want different things from work, but that doesn’t mean their work ethic is low.
I mean, it takes a certain type of person to write a 1,000-word essay on why they want to work for a bakery chain (see video). A role that previous generations could’ve gotten with a polite word and a handshake.
Not to mention, many new graduates are now applying for hundreds of roles only to get ghosted.
Sounds to me like there isn’t a work ethic problem, but a generational divide (again).
Younger generations—who struggled through Covid, global warming, and the rise of AI during their formative years—are getting the blame for the consequences of problems they didn’t create.
We need to remember that, regardless of someone’s age, we have more in common.
We all crave the same love and security. But that goal is further away for Gen Z than it ever was for previous generations.
When The Simpsons was created in the 1980s, they were designed to reflect the average family. Now, owning a house, having children, and even finding a partner are pipe dreams for many.
A little empathy and understanding goes a long way.
Consider setting up mentoring programs (or even try reverse mentoring) to connect your older and younger employees. Alternatively, you could mix up groups when doing team activities or simply get employees from different generations to share their stories.
Stories are an essential tool to help us connect. It’s only through sharing them that we’ll really understand what it’s like for other people.
Conclusion
The employee engagement trends for 2026 are all about bringing the human touch back into HR while reducing the need for humans to do menial tasks.
If you want to inject more humanity into your business, both through high-touch efforts and increased connection, Workrowd has your back. Our all-in-one tool suite automates core elements of your employee experience, so you can focus on the work that really matters.
Plus, with real-time insights into employee sentiment, you’ll always know where to dedicate your time and resources to get the most bang for your buck. And we all know that boosting your ROI is an employee engagement trend that never goes out of style. Get in touch today to learn more about Workrowd.
