Who Is Responsible for Employee Engagement?

So, Who Is Responsible for Employee Engagement?
We know from organizational culture assessment data that employee engagement remains a persistent challenge and opportunity for most leaders. Despite decades of research and millions invested in employee engagement surveys and employee engagement initiatives, engagement levels continue to lag. According to Gallup’s recent State of the Global Workplace report, only 23% of employees are actively engaged at work. That statistic prompts a critical question: Who is responsible for employee engagement at your organization?

This seemingly simple question has a deceptively complex answer.

We believe that engagement is not the responsibility of one individual, function, or system. It is a shared accountability that depends on alignment across leadership, managers, employees, and organizational systems. Without organizational alignment, even the most well-intentioned engagement efforts do not improve employee retention or performance.

The Engagement Accountability Ladder

1. Senior Leaders: Set the Strategic and Cultural Direction
   At the top of the engagement accountability ladder sit senior executives. Their responsibility is to co-design and communicate a clear strategy that employees can believe in and commit to. But a strategic vision alone is not enough. Leaders must model the values and behaviors they expect to see and ensure the culture they create supports, rather than undermines, employee engagement.
   
   Research from the Harvard Business Review (2022) underscores that culture starts at the top — and employees are 12 times more likely to be engaged when they believe their organization’s leadership is committed to a positive workplace culture. Senior leaders also control the structural levers: resource allocation, strategic priorities, business practices, and performance metrics. If engagement isn’t integrated into these core systems, it becomes just another “nice-to-have” HR program.
   
   
2. Managers: Drive the Day-to-Day Experience
   While leaders set the tone, managers make or break the employee experience. Gallup reports that managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement. That is an astonishing number — and one that underscores how critical it is to select, train, and support the right people in people-leadership roles.
   
   Managers are responsible for building trust, setting clear expectations, providing feedback and coaching, and recognizing contributions. They create an environment where employees either thrive or disengage. Yet too often, managers are promoted for their technical skills rather than leadership ability and receive insufficient support to build engaged and high performing teams. When that happens, engagement suffers.
   
   
3. Employees: Own Their Mindset and Contribution
   Employees are not passive recipients of engagement. They have a major role to play. While organizations must provide an environment where people can engage, individuals must choose to be That means employees must take ownership of their attitude, seeking feedback, initiating development opportunities, and aligning their work with personal purpose and organizational goals.
   
   In a recent study published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior, researchers found that employee psychological capital — hope, efficacy, resilience, and optimism — was strongly correlated with self-driven engagement behaviors. In other words, engaged employees don’t wait for permission to care about their work.
   
   However, this self-ownership only emerges when there is enough psychological team safety. Blaming employees for low engagement without addressing systemic issues is a failure of leadership.
   
   
4. HR and People Functions: Enable Systems and Practices
   While not the “owners” of engagement, HR and People teams are essential enablers. They design and implement the practices — performance management, learning, recognition, feedback, workforce and succession planning — that either support or inhibit engagement. They are also responsible for gathering insights through data and diagnostics and translating those insights into engagement actions.
   
   HR must move beyond owning “the engagement survey” and toward being strategic advisors who help leaders and managers create the conditions for engagement. A great engagement dashboard won’t fix an unclear strategy, a toxic manager or a misaligned culture.

The Role of Alignment
Engagement is the outcome of strategic, cultural, and leadership alignment. When strategy is clear, culture is healthy, leaders are credible, managers are competent, and employees are empowered, engagement naturally follows.

Misalignment, by contrast, creates friction: leaders say one thing and do another; managers are left unsupported; employees are unclear on what matters most. In such environments, even highly motivated people burn out or disengage.

The Bottom Line
Employee engagement is a shared responsibility. Senior leaders must set direction and align culture. Managers must create a motivating environment. Employees must choose to show up with energy and intent. And HR must enable the systems that support it all. When these forces work in concert, engagement becomes more than just an HR metric.

To learn more about who is responsible for employee engagement, download Top 6 Forces Driving Employee Engagement and Strategies to Move the Engagement Needle