Hybrid and remote employees in organizations adopting AI experienced the sharpest declines.
U.S. employee engagement fell to 29% in the third quarter of 2026, its lowest level since 2011 and down two percentage points from the previous quarter. The share of actively disengaged employees rose from 17% to 18%, while 53% were not engaged.
The latest decline was sharpest among remote and hybrid employees, particularly those in organizations that have adopted artificial intelligence. Employees also reported less clarity about what is expected of them at work and were less likely to feel that someone at work cares about them as a person. These findings raise questions about whether communication and manager support are keeping pace with AI integration.
I was so angry when we were required to use AI as much as possible, that now I don’t make a decision, write an email, give an update, or answer a ping without telling AI to do it, waiting for the result, and copy/pasting whatever slop it gives me.
They want the slop? They get only slop.
Why even do the copy paste? Just set up an AI agent to answer your emails, and go home!
I got paranoid that would be too obvious
42 year old engineer here … my entire career was disengaged
I work at a multinational mega Corp, but not one you’ve probably heard of. I am very disengaged.
For one thing, I’m technically a “contractor”. I have to go to all the meetings, but I don’t technically work for them. They give me the legal minimum of paid time off, but only after I looked up what my rights are and fought them for it. They don’t pay for holidays. They say “have a nice Thanksgiving” and then dock me two days pay.
The pay is insulting. I’m making less than I made ten years ago.
There’s no technical leadership. These people are supposed to be doing python. They don’t know what unit tests are. They barely know how imports work. Trying to change everything is a months long battle and emotion massaging exercise. The people in charge don’t understand or care.
They do love AI though. Lots of AI generated code. They don’t understand it but it looks so slick. Vomit.
So fuck them. I used to go out of my way to fix problems and promote good practices. Not anymore. I hope the upper management and owners suffer.
They’re probably not even renewing contractors past the end of the year anyway.
If you like me didn’t know what this means: Employee engagement is a subjective measure of how committed Employees feel to their jobs.
Being committed to a job is a wild metric, considering commitment requires loyalty from both parties and companies have shown over and over again that they are not loyal to their employees.
Yeah it is, so is this metric set to blame the employee or the company as the reason for the drop? The company should hold the blame here.
Is there a corresponding employer engagement metric?
I agree, and I’d call it a weird metric, and I am not sure this says much, except that if people feel they are underpaid, of course their enthusiasm will drop. So my guess this is a result of people feeling underpaid or treated poorly.
The employee engagement thing sounds 100% like something designed for the employers, so they can see how “dedicated” their workers are.
Sounds about right. Rewards seem to have no relation to contributions in my workplace, and I’m guessing I’m not alone. Might as well try to give them as little as possible of yourself. You’ve seen so many people work hard and end up looking like fools for it.
So telling everyone they had to return to the office after COVID actually did jack shit then?
Right, got it.
This survey shows the biggest drop in engagement among remote workers. This is going to be just another justification for more RTO.
