Why Is Employee Engagement So Low? Data from Turkey and Ways Forward

Why is employee engagement so low in Turkey? Read the Gallup 2026 data, the factors that reduce engagement and practical steps employers can take to improve it.

However well a business's machinery, processes and targets are designed, what really determines results is how much the people doing the work every day invest in it. Employee engagement describes exactly this investment: a person putting their energy, attention and voluntary effort into their work. In Turkey, this picture is markedly below the world average. In this article, for business owners, factory managers and HR managers, I look at what engagement is, why it remains low in Turkey, what it costs a business, and where an organisation can begin.

What Is Employee Engagement?

Employee engagement is the level of emotional and mental involvement an employee has in their work. An engaged employee does not see the job merely as a task that "has to be done"; they care about the outcome, speak up when they see a problem, make an effort to develop and contribute to their team. Engagement is different from job satisfaction: someone who is content with their job is not always engaged with it. Satisfaction describes the feeling "I'm comfortable here," while engagement describes the feeling "I contribute here and it is meaningful to me."

Organisations such as Gallup usually divide employees into three groups:

• Engaged: Employees who take part in their work willingly, take responsibility and move the organisation forward.
• Not engaged: Employees who do their job but whose emotional investment is limited, who "do what is needed." The phenomenon of quiet quitting, much discussed in recent years, is seen largely in this group.
• Actively disengaged: Employees who are markedly unhappy in their work and who project this unhappiness onto those around them.

Employee Engagement in Turkey: What Does the Data Say?

Gallup's State of the Global Workplace report, published in April 2026 (2025 data), presents a striking picture for Turkey:

• The proportion of employees in Turkey who are truly engaged in their work is 8%. This figure is 14% in the Middle East and North Africa region and 20% worldwide.
• 68% of employees are in the "not engaged" group and 24% in the "actively disengaged" group.
• 66% of employees say they spent much of the previous day under stress; the global average is 40%.
• The proportion experiencing anger daily is 36%, sadness 27% and loneliness 23%.
• Only 19% rate their lives as "thriving."

(Gallup, 2026, 2025 data)

The global picture is not encouraging either. Worldwide, engagement has fallen to 20%, declining for two years in a row for the first time (Gallup, 2026). Gallup estimates the cost of low engagement to the world economy at about 10 trillion dollars, or 9% of global GDP (Gallup, 2026).

When reading these figures, one point should be kept in mind: they show nationwide trends; your business may be doing better or worse than this. But one thing is clear: in an average workplace in Turkey, nine out of every ten employees are not fully engaged in their work. This means organisations are failing to use a great deal of potential.

Why Is Employee Engagement Low? Psychological and Organisational Causes

Low engagement can rarely be traced to a single cause. From a psychological point of view, for a person to invest in a job, a few basic needs must be met: competence (believing you can succeed at the job), autonomy (having some say over how you work), relatedness (being seen and valued within the team) and meaning (feeling that what you do serves a purpose). When these needs are not met, engagement declines.

In the Turkish context, the factors that stand out are:

Intense stress and workload

For an employee who spends much of the day under stress, energy goes less into contributing to the work than into "getting through the day." Even in a broad survey in Europe, 46% of employees reported severe time pressure or work overload (EU-OSHA, 2022). Given that stress rates in Turkey are thought to be even higher than this, workload management becomes one of the first conditions for engagement.

Economic uncertainty and the cost of living

Inflation and the high cost of living keep an employee's mind constantly occupied with the question "Will I be able to get by?" In periods when wages erode quickly, employees may begin to see their job less as a source of meaning than as a means of survival. According to Gallup data, the proportion of people in Turkey who say it is "a good time to find a job" is 23% (Gallup, 2026). When leaving looks hard, people stay, but without engagement.

Management style and communication

Hierarchical, top-down management styles in which feedback is given only when something goes wrong silence the employee's voice. In the European survey, 26% of employees reported poor communication or cooperation within the organisation and 18% a lack of autonomy (EU-OSHA, 2022). Employees who do not know the reasons behind decisions, and are not asked for their views, find it hard to take ownership of the work.

Managers' own struggles

The direct manager does more than anything to determine team engagement, but managers are under pressure too. Globally, manager engagement has fallen to 22%, down 9 points since 2022 (Gallup, 2026). A supervisor or manager who is themselves exhausted finds it hard to pass energy and meaning on to their team. For this reason, engagement work should start with the manager.

Perceptions of development and fairness

In environments where the career path is invisible and promotion and pay decisions are not transparent, employees do not believe they will be there in the future and do not invest in the present. A perception of unfairness is one of the areas in which engagement erodes fastest.

Engagement is not a feeling that can be "increased" with a campaign; it is the natural result of the work experience employees have every day.

Early Warning Signs That Engagement Is Declining

Engagement does not usually collapse overnight; it erodes gradually. That is why, without waiting for the annual survey results, it is important to watch for some signs in day-to-day operations:

• Fewer suggestions: If the suggestion box stays empty and the same few people speak in improvement meetings, most employees may have come to believe that speaking up will not change anything.
• Increase in short-term absence: One- or two-day absences clustered on days such as Mondays or before holidays often point to a declining desire to come to work.
• Disinterest in voluntary duties: Participation in training, mentoring and social events falls.
• New employees leaving quickly: An increase in people leaving in the first months can show that the team climate struggles to welcome newcomers.
• Gossip and cliques: When official communication channels do not work, information travels through informal routes, often in a negative tone.

Suppose that in a production plant, a shift team's error rate begins to rise for no obvious reason. A technical inspection finds nothing wrong with the machines. When the shift supervisor is consulted, it turns out that two experienced employees have left in recent months, those who replaced them have not been adequately trained, and those who remain are carrying the load through overtime. The apparent quality problem is in fact an engagement and workload problem. Catching such patterns early gives you the chance to intervene before problems grow.

The Effect of Low Engagement on the Business

Although engagement may seem an abstract concept, its effects are very concrete:

• Productivity and quality: A disengaged employee stays at the "adequate" level; error detection and process improvement decline.
• Occupational safety: An employee who is not mentally involved in the job is easily distracted and has low motivation to spot and report risks. In high-risk sectors such as manufacturing, this can increase the risk of workplace accidents.
• Absenteeism and staff turnover: An employee with a weak bond takes leave more often and is among the first to leave when an opportunity arises. In a study in the United Kingdom, about 40% of the costs of staff leaving were attributed to mental health problems (Deloitte, 2022).
• Team climate: The negativity of actively disengaged employees can spread to those around them and wear down engaged employees too.
• Employer brand: Unhappy employees' stories spread quickly, especially in smaller cities and industry circles, and make it harder to find skilled labour.

What Can Employers Do to Increase Employee Engagement?

There is no magic formula for increasing engagement; however, research and experience in the field show that certain principles work consistently. Practical steps include:

1. Invest in managers

In the WHO's 2022 guidelines on mental health at work, the recommendation with the strongest evidence is mental health training for managers (strong recommendation, moderate-certainty evidence) (WHO, 2022). Managers who can notice a struggling employee, talk to them without judgement and manage workload realistically are the strongest levers of engagement. Be sure to include first-line managers such as supervisors and foremen in these training programmes. In factories, the person the employee has most contact with is not the general manager but the shift supervisor; how this person handles a problem largely determines the employee's perception of the organisation. Do not ignore managers' own stress load either: offering them a space where they can seek advice, and support when needed, directly affects the energy they pass on to their teams.

2. Establish regular, two-way communication

Short team meetings, start-of-shift briefings and open-door conversations keep employees informed about where the organisation is heading. But communication must involve listening, not just announcements. Giving feedback on how employees' suggestions have been considered feeds the feeling that "my voice counts."

3. Give people a say and autonomy

Involve employees in decisions about how the work will be done. Process improvement groups, suggestion systems and flexibility in shift planning increase ownership.

4. Bring appreciation into daily life

Appreciation should not be squeezed into an annual review meeting. Saying who did what well, in a timely and concrete way, is a strong source of motivation regardless of financial rewards.

5. Strengthen psychological safety

An environment in which an employee who reports an error or a risk is thanked rather than punished is the foundation of engagement. In a classic study of 51 teams at a manufacturing company, psychological safety was found to be associated with learning behaviour (Edmondson, 1999).

6. Make development paths visible

Every employee should have a development step ahead of them, however small: a new skill, increased responsibility, rotation or a master-craftsperson title. Do not limit career conversations to white-collar staff.

7. Tackle stress at the organisational level

Do not try to resolve the sources of stress that reduce engagement through individual techniques alone. Organisational factors such as workload, shift patterns, role ambiguity and interpersonal conflict need to be addressed. The ILO also stresses that individual measures should complement organisational measures, not replace them (ILO, 2026).

How to Get Started in Your Organisation

Most work on employee engagement fails to deliver results because of one-off activities carried out without measurement or an understanding of the causes. A more systematic path proceeds in three stages:

1. Needs analysis: Start with an employee survey with guaranteed anonymity, unit-based focus group discussions and an examination of existing indicators such as absenteeism, resignations and number of suggestions. Seeing which factor reduces engagement in which unit lets you direct resources to the right place.
2. Programme: Based on the findings, manager training, improvements to communication and appreciation practices, work on workload and role clarity and, where needed, individual psychological support for employees should be planned together. Programmes that include reinforcement sessions should be preferred to one-off seminars; research shows that the effect of one-off resilience training declines markedly over time (Vanhove et al., 2016).
3. Measurement: Repeat the same survey after six months or a year; monitor the change in indicators and update the programme accordingly.

If you are curious about the effect of investing in mental health on business results, take a look at the article on the return on investment in employee mental health. You can explore a needs analysis and programme options suited to your organisation on our corporate services page.

Frequently Asked Questions

Are employee engagement and employee satisfaction the same thing?

No. Satisfaction shows whether the employee is content with their conditions; engagement shows how much energy and voluntary effort they put into the work. High pay and comfortable conditions can increase satisfaction, but without meaning, a say and development, engagement may not form.

Is a pay rise enough to increase engagement?

Fair and liveable pay is a precondition for engagement; pay unfairness erodes engagement quickly. But pay alone is not enough. The effect of increases made without fixing the manager relationship, appreciation, workload and development opportunities is usually short-lived.

How can a small business measure engagement?

No comprehensive software is needed. A short anonymous survey of a few questions, regular one-to-one conversations with managers and tracking of absence and resignation records give a sufficient picture to start with. What matters is that the results are shared and followed up with a concrete step.

When can the results of engagement work be seen?

This varies with the source of the problem and the scope of the steps taken. Changes in areas such as communication and appreciation can be felt quickly; transformations in organisational culture require a longer effort. Regular measurement and patience are therefore integral parts of the process.

• #employee engagement
• #workplace wellbeing
• #human resources
• #organisational culture

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Eda Erkan Alapala

Klinik Psikolog. İstanbul Kent Üniversitesi Klinik Psikoloji Tezli Yüksek Lisans mezunu; bilişsel davranışçı terapi, çocuk merkezli oyun terapisi ve çocuk-ergen psikoterapisi alanlarında eğitimlerini tamamlamıştır.

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