Four Steps to Increase Engagement with Compassionate Accountability®️

According to Gallup’s employee engagement survey, the percentage of US employees who are actively engaged at work has fallen from 36% in 2020 to 31% in 2025. Generation Z and young millennials are reporting the biggest drops, largely due to feeling cared about, having opportunities to learn, and being developed at work.

The Gallup report states, “Generation Z and younger millennial employees were 13 points less likely in 2025 (41%) than in 2020 (54%) to strongly agree with the statement, “My supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person.” Agreement with the statement “This last year, I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow” also fell 11 points, to 37% from 48% in 2020.”

What Do Employees Really Want?

This data suggests that engagement is tied to employees feeling valuable, capable, and responsible. That’s Compassionate Accountability®️.

Turning this trend around requires a mindset shift in the midst of increased tension, volatility, mobility, hybrid work, and other challenging economic factors. Compassionate Accountability offers a framework for addressing increasing engagement by treating employees as valuable, capable, and responsible.

Four Steps To Increase Engagement With Compassionate Accountability

1. Measure It

If you are using Gallup or another engagement metric, that’s terrific. Keep it up. We recommend adding these three questions to your survey to identify where you stand on treating employees as valuable, capable, and responsible, and which specific behaviors are contributing to the employee experience. Want an even more powerful measure of where your energy is going? Try the free Drama Resilience assessment on our homepage to see how conflict is being managed in productive and unproductive ways. Trust in leadership is at an all-time low, and younger employees are watching to see how leaders are managing conflict.

If you can’t measure it, you can’t lead it.

2. Activate The Mindset

Mindset precedes behavior change, so if you want to change engagement, you have to change how you see yourself and your employees. The Compassion Mindset includes specific attitudes and choices we make about how to treat people, and it makes a real difference. The three foundational beliefs are:

People are Valuable: Everyone is worthy of being seen, heard, affirmed, safe, invited, and included.

People are Capable: Everyone can learn and grow and take ownership in the decisions that impact them the most.

People are Responsible: No matter what happened before, everyone is 100% responsible for their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. No more. No less.

For the mindset to be fully activated, it needs to be embedded in company values, job descriptions, performance reviews, and daily behavior norms.

How to hire for a Compassion Mindset.

How does Compassion Mindset compare to Growth Mindset?

Want to activate the mindset in your culture? Here’s a self-guided eLearning course for every employee to complete that will teach the. mindset at the ground level.

3. Train The Right Leadership Skills

Up to 70% of engagement is tied to relationships that employees have with their supervisor. Like it or not, leaders make the biggest difference in engagement, so they need to be equipped with the skills to demonstrate that employees are valuable, capable, and responsible in every interaction.

Here’s a guide to applying Compassionate Accountability in daily behaviors to show employees they matter.

If you want formal training for your leaders, we have evidence-based and outcomes-tested curriculum for teaching the behavioral skills that make the most difference. Contact us about getting your L&D or HR people certified to teach our courses.

4. Correct, But Don’t Overcorrect

One of the biggest challenges leaders face is the tension between relationships and results; compassion and accountability. Under pressure and change, it’s tempting to lean one way or the other. But if you overindex towards relationships/compassion at the expense of results, you will lose trust because people can’t count on you to uphold standards when it matters most. If you overindex towards results/accountability at the expense of relationships, you will lose trust because people don’t feel safe with you.

When you measure what matters most, activate the Compassion Mindset, and train the right skills, leaders won’t have to choose one over the other. They can lead with both Compassion AND Accountability. They can treat employees as valuable, capable, and responsible to increase engagement.

Copyright Next Element Consulting, LLC 2026