Engagement Is a Community Outcome

(Part 2 of a 5-part series)

Why People Contribute More When They Know They Matter

Organizations have spent decades trying to improve employee engagement. They conduct surveys, introduce recognition programs, expand benefits, train managers, and communicate organizational purpose. Yet engagement remains persistently low. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 found that only 20 percent of employees worldwide were engaged in 2025; 64 percent were not engaged and another 16 percent were actively disengaged. Engagement among managers—the people through whom employees most directly experience an organization—had fallen to 22 percent.

These figures raise a difficult question. What if engagement cannot be created by adding more engagement initiatives? What if it is not something leaders deliver to employees, but something that emerges from how people experience themselves in relationship with their work, their colleagues, and the organization as a whole?

Perhaps engagement is less a program than a community outcome. It grows when people know their work has meaning, their voice can influence what happens, and their presence matters.

Beyond Satisfaction

Engagement is sometimes confused with satisfaction. A person may be satisfied with their salary, schedule, or working conditions without feeling deeply connected to the work. They may appreciate their manager and colleagues and have no immediate intention of leaving, yet still contribute only what is required. Satisfaction asks whether the arrangement is acceptable. Engagement asks whether something in the person has entered the work.

An engaged employee brings attention, imagination, and discretionary effort. They notice opportunities and problems that do not appear in a job description. They care about the quality of what is being created and feel a relationship between their own contribution and the organization’s larger purpose. This cannot be commanded. Leaders can require attendance, assign responsibilities, and measure performance, but they cannot require genuine care. Care becomes available when people experience enough trust, agency, meaning, and belonging to invest more of themselves.

This is why engagement cannot be separated from the quality of community within an organization.

Working for an Organization or Belonging to Its Work

An organization coordinates activity around a purpose. It creates roles, structures, policies, decision-making processes, and accountabilities. These are necessary. Community describes another dimension of collective life: how people experience their relationship with one another and with the whole. Do they feel recognized? Can they contribute honestly? Is there enough trust to ask for help, raise a concern, or acknowledge uncertainty? Do they experience themselves as participants in the organization or mainly as recipients of decisions made elsewhere?

A person can be employed by an organization without experiencing meaningful membership in it. They may attend meetings, complete tasks, and receive organizational communications while remaining outside the conversations that shape the work. Their labour is included, but their perception, experience, and imagination may not be.

Over time, this creates a quiet separation. The organization asks for commitment, but people experience little authorship. Leaders ask for initiative, while important decisions remain concentrated elsewhere. Employees are invited to share their views but rarely see how those views affect what follows. What is described as disengagement may therefore be more than a failure of attitude. Sometimes it is an intelligent response to the repeated experience that one’s fuller participation does not matter.

The Experience of Mattering

Meaning at work is often associated with the organization’s mission, but a compelling purpose statement is not enough. People also need to experience how their own contribution connects with that purpose. A hospital may proclaim compassionate care while staff feel unheard and disconnected from decisions affecting patients. A nonprofit may serve an important social purpose while its employees experience little care within the organization. A company may speak about innovation while people learn that questioning established assumptions carries personal risk.

The stated purpose and the lived experience can move in different directions. People are more likely to find meaning when they can see that what they do affects something beyond completing a task: a customer’s experience, a colleague’s success, a community’s wellbeing, or the organization’s ability to fulfil its purpose.

People also need to experience that the organization is affected by their presence. This does not mean every suggestion is accepted, but that there is a visible relationship between what they contribute and what the organization becomes. Their knowledge influences a decision, their concern reveals a risk, or their commitment becomes part of what others can rely upon. They are participating in the organization’s ongoing creation, not merely implementing someone else’s.

Randstad’s 2025 Workmonitor found that 83 percent of workers wanted a sense of community at work, 55 percent were willing to leave when they did not feel they belonged, and 85 percent believed community improved their performance. This does not require manufactured friendship. Healthy community respects privacy and choice while giving people the more fundamental experience that they are not alone inside the system.

This becomes especially important during disruption. Employees are not only trying to understand new strategies or technologies; they are also asking whether they still have a place in the future being created. Community provides relational stability without promising that circumstances will remain stable.

Trust Makes Contribution Possible

People rarely offer their fullest contribution where they do not trust how it will be received. They may withhold an unconventional idea because previous suggestions were dismissed, remain silent about a risk because leaders appear committed to a particular story, or avoid acknowledging difficulty because the culture rewards confidence and punishes vulnerability. From the outside, this can look like passivity. Inside the person, it may be discernment.

People continually read the environment. Is it safe to speak? Is curiosity genuinely welcome? Will uncertainty be interpreted as incompetence? Will disagreement affect future opportunities? Will what is shared be used responsibly? PwC’s 2025 Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey found that employees with the highest trust in their direct managers were 72 percent more motivated than those with the lowest trust. Yet only 58 percent said they trusted their direct manager and could speak openly with them, while barely half trusted top management.

Trust is not created by telling people that leaders are trustworthy. It develops through repeated experience. Leaders listen without retaliation, commitments are remembered, difficult information is not hidden, and people understand how their input will be used. Decisions are explained honestly, including constraints and trade-offs. Leaders acknowledge mistakes and revise their thinking when new information emerges. Trust grows when what the organization says about participation is consistent with what people experience when they participate.

Invitation, Agency, and Ownership

Many organizational initiatives begin with a predetermined outcome. Leaders decide what must happen and then invite people to become engaged in making it happen. Sometimes this is necessary; certain decisions belong to particular roles, and some changes are not optional. The difficulty arises when mobilization is presented as co-creation.

People recognize the difference between shaping something and endorsing what has already been shaped. When the distinction is unclear, participation becomes performative. A genuine invitation is transparent about what is open, what is not, how input will be used, and what responsibility accompanies involvement. It also leaves room for hesitation and dissent.

Organizations frequently ask employees to take greater ownership, but ownership cannot be assigned like a task. It grows when people have enough agency to make meaningful choices and enough connection to experience the consequences. Consultation asks what people think. Ownership asks what they are willing to take responsibility for, what promise they can make, what support they need, and how they may be contributing to the conditions they want to change.

These questions move participation beyond opinion. People recognize that they are helping to create culture through how they speak, listen, follow through, address conflict, and use or withhold their gifts. Power differences remain real, yet even within constraints people often have more agency than either leaders or employees initially recognize. Liberating leadership helps make that agency visible.

Dissent and the Gifts Already Present

Engagement is sometimes unconsciously equated with enthusiasm. The engaged employee is imagined as positive, supportive, and aligned, while the person raising doubts is labelled resistant or difficult. Yet dissent can be one of the deepest forms of engagement. A person who no longer cares may simply withdraw. Someone who voices concern may be trying to protect the quality of the work, the wellbeing of colleagues, the integrity of the purpose, or the organization’s long-term success.

The question is not whether every dissenting view is correct, but whether the organization can receive the information it carries. When people can disagree without threatening their belonging, assumptions are tested, risks are identified earlier, and alternatives can be considered before decisions become difficult to reverse. When dissent is punished, it does not disappear. It moves into private conversations, passive resistance, cynicism, or departure.

Every organization contains capacities it is not fully using. Some people see patterns across departments; others can calm a tense room, translate complexity, notice who has been excluded, or ask the question everyone else avoids. These gifts may sit outside formal roles. Engagement deepens when people can contribute more of what they uniquely carry without turning authenticity into another demand. When gifts serve something meaningful, aliveness and responsibility often grow together.

A Whole-System Responsibility

Managers play a central role in engagement, but the burden cannot rest on them alone. A manager may invite participation while working inside a system that rewards only short-term delivery, limits their authority, or sends major decisions downward without explanation.

Community is a whole-system responsibility. Senior leaders shape the conditions in which managers lead. Structures determine where decisions can be made, meeting practices affect whose voices are heard, incentives communicate what truly matters, and stories about success reveal which behaviours the organization honours. Engagement grows when these elements become more coherent and people no longer hear an invitation to participate while simultaneously experiencing control.

Liberating leadership is not primarily an effort to motivate people. It creates conditions in which their existing capacity to care, contribute, and take responsibility becomes more available. Instead of asking how to get people engaged, leaders can ask what makes withdrawal reasonable, whose knowledge is missing, where trust has weakened, and what responsibility or gifts could be more widely shared.

Practicing Community in the Liberating Leadership Lab

The Liberating Leadership Lab approaches engagement from this deeper perspective. It is not a course in increasing enthusiasm or implementing another culture initiative. It is an experiential exploration of the conditions through which people become more willing and able to participate fully.

Participants practice creating trustworthy containers and meaningful invitations. Through dialogue, ownership, dissent, shadow, commitment, and gifts, they experience how more of a group’s intelligence and responsibility can become available. Community cannot be learned only as a concept; it must be experienced.

Organizations will continue to measure engagement, and surveys can reveal important patterns. But the survey is not the experience. The deeper evidence appears in what people are willing to bring. Do they speak before a risk becomes a crisis, offer an idea without knowing whether it will succeed, ask for help, challenge a decision while remaining committed to the whole, and take responsibility without waiting to be instructed?

These behaviours cannot be extracted from people. They arise from the quality of the environment people are helping to inhabit. Engagement grows when individuals stop experiencing themselves as the audience for someone else’s organization and begin recognizing themselves as participants in its future. People contribute more when they know their work matters, and more deeply when they know that they matter too.