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Engage for Success · 2026

Productivity Starts with People: Key Findings from the 2026 Engage for Success Annual Survey

Reported by Engage for Success. The analysis below is ours.

An empty meeting table with grey chairs beside tall windows and potted plants
Photo: Vladimir Srajber on Pexels

79%

engagement where staff see both leaders and managers put people issues first, against 50% where they see neither do

The EFS Engagement Index (satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy, averaged) from the 2026 annual survey with Nottingham Business School, of what the report calls a representative sample of the UK working population: 46% saw both leaders and managers prioritise people issues, 36% saw neither

Engage for Success asked whether leaders and managers put people issues first. Where staff saw both do it, engagement stood at 79%; where they saw neither, it was 50%, and more than a third of staff saw neither. The same report links command-and-control management with more stress and more people keeping quiet about problems, so the gap is less about perks than about how a manager runs the week.

What MeaningFuel does about it

Before it happensWhat the daily ritual works on, every working day
Leadership & Coaching and Trust every working morning, for the manager and the team on the same two-minute question. The people side of the job comes up daily in small pieces, with no separate programme for an already busy manager to run.
After it hasThe module prescribed to the team that has this
Book Clear Direction for the team whose manager runs it by instruction: ten short daily lessons over two working weeks on making direction clear from both ends. The team practises asking what done looks like and saying it back; the lead practises the Coaching Kata's five questions and answering plainly, and runs two ten-minute debriefs from a written guide. Each person chooses whether to take part, and nobody's answers reach the lead.
What management seesThe reading that makes either one provable
Engagement by team and by theme, each against the previous period of the same length, so the team where it is falling shows inside the company rather than in next year's national survey. What anybody chose waits until enough have answered to hide each choice, and no screen shows an individual's.

The offsite worked. That was never the problem.

Week six is the problem. The person who ran it has moved teams, the thing everyone agreed has quietly stopped happening, and nobody can name the day it stopped.

MeaningFuel keeps it going: one short insight each working day on the values you chose, and a two-week micro-training for any team that falls behind. You see which teams carry them, pooled, with nobody named.

Start 14 days freeNot convinced? Read the long version

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