Less than one-third—31.5%—of all U.S. workers were engaged in their jobs in 2014, a new Gallup poll says. Nonetheless, Gallup says the average is up nearly two percentage points from 29.6% in 2013 and represents the highest reading since 2000, when it first began tracking the engagement levels of the U.S. working population.
However, a majority of employees, 51%, were still “not engaged” and 17.5% were “actively disengaged” in 2014. Gallup defines engaged employees as those who are “involved in, enthusiastic about and committed to their work and workplace.” The 2014 employee engagement average is based on Gallup tracking interviews conducted from January to December 2014 with 80,837 adults employed by an employer.
The 1.9 percentage point increase in engagement from 2013 to 2014 represents 2.5 million employees nationwide. Gallup categorizes workers as engaged based on their responses to key workplace elements it has found to predict important organizational performance outcomes.
Among job categories, managers, executives and officers had the highest levels of engagement in 2014 at 38.4%. This group outpaced every other job category Gallup tracked and saw the greatest gains in engagement from 2013, moving up nearly four points from 34.7%.
At the other end of the spectrum, employees in manufacturing or production jobs recorded the lowest levels of engagement with an average of 23%. Employees in transportation (25.5%) and service (28.2%) roles also had engagement levels that fell well below the national average. Read the full story.
