In my book there is a paragraph I enjoyed writing a little too much. A leadership team announces that it is now serious about employee engagement. The plan: an annual marathon, Kilimanjaro with the CEO heroically leading the charge, a fitness tracker for everyone and a fancy bottle of wine at year-end.
Then comes the question that spoils the party. “But who said your employees actually want this?”
It reads like satire. The research on how far apart leaders and employees can be suggests it is closer to reporting.
What the numbers say
In 2024, Right Management surveyed more than 400 leaders and 1,000 employees in the US and Canada for a report called The Engagement Illusion. 83% of leaders said their workforce was fully engaged. Among employees, 48% described themselves that way.
Gallup found a similar split on recognition. 59% of managers said they recognised good work, against 35% of employees who said they received it.
The Right Management study covers North America, so I wouldn’t paste its percentages onto a Dubai company. The direction is the point: leaders rate the experience higher than the people living it. (A recent piece from happily.ai pulls together several of these studies, if you want to read more.)
Mostly not bad faith
I don’t think most leaders are being dishonest. In the leadership chapter of my book I wrote that “just because you believe you are trustworthy (which is certainly a good starting point), it doesn’t imply others will perceive you as such.” The same goes for engagement. You can sincerely believe your people are engaged and still be wrong.
Three things in the book explain how that happens:
We assume everyone shares our taste. That is the Kilimanjaro problem. The book refers to a report by Winckworth Sherwood in which 37% of employers thought benefits such as yoga, resilience training and healthy lifestyle seminars were effective, against 26% of employees. Half of the employees favoured good work itself.
The answers get polished before they arrive. I wrote about managers who urge their teams to give top scores so the organisation looks good, something I have seen all too often, especially in the UAE. The trap is “fooling ourselves into seeing only what we want to see, rather than what’s really going on.”
And people stop answering when nothing happens. Is it survey fatigue, or rather lack-of-action fatigue? When employees share their views, there is an implicit contract: they tell you, you show what you did with it. Break it, and the next survey gets reluctant answers or none at all.
Closing the gap is less glamorous than a mountain
Ask more often, ask lighter, and show what you did with the answers. In the book I argue for short, ongoing questionnaires over a single annual survey, because human memory rarely stretches beyond three months and one yearly snapshot depends too much on when it lands. Listen, act, then listen again.
One example from the book stays with me. Amadou Diallo of DHL Global Forwarding is a big believer in Gemba walks: going to the place where the work happens. Even so, he felt there was no KPI for the sparkle in people’s eyes. So DHL introduced a daily mood measure, and every morning the executives receive a report. It isn’t the most scientific method, as I say in the book, but it is direct, actionable feedback. A leader who already walks the floor still decided not to rely on his own impression.
Where Bravos comes in
At Bravos we built the assessment around this distance. Leaders and employees answer the same questions separately, and we report the gap between the two views, set against comparable organisations in the UAE rather than against an abstract ideal. Plenty of organisations measure engagement. Far fewer measure the distance. For me, the gap between those two readings is the most useful number an organisation can hold.
It starts with a short readiness scan at bravos.ae: the result comes on the spot and there is no commitment attached.
Ask first. Then, if the answer is Kilimanjaro, pack the boots.
More in Employee Engagement, What Else?, in the chapters on leadership, well-being and measuring engagement.