Follow us on LinkedInGlobal employee engagement fell to just 20% in 2025, its lowest point since 2020. That means four out of every five employees worldwide are either going through the motions or actively working against the goals of their organization.
The cost is an estimated $10 trillion in lost productivity globally, equivalent to 9% of global GDP.
And you can't conference-room your way out of this. Ping-pong tables, pizza Fridays, and quarterly all-hands don't move the needle.
What you need is intentional, human-centered employee engagement activities that are embedded into the day-to-day experience of work, not bolted on as an afterthought.
The companies on this list (a deliberately mixed group of giants, mid-sized businesses, and small operators) have figured that out.
Matthew Pepe
Why the right employee engagement activities are a business-critical priority in 2026
Before we get to the examples, it's worth grounding you in the stakes.
Gallup's research confirms that 64% of employees are currently not engaged, and 16% are actively disengaged.
This means they're not just checked out, they may be actively undermining the people around them. Perhaps most alarming for people leaders: manager engagement has plummeted from 31% in 2022 to just 22% in 2025.
The people responsible for delivering your engagement activities on the ground are themselves disengaging. That's a compounding problem.
But in best-practice organizations, 79% of managers are engaged, nearly four times the global average. The gap between the best and the rest isn't a mystery, it’s a function of deliberate investment.
1. Hilton: Data-driven wellbeing activities that actually move the retention needle
Hilton is operating at a scale most of us will never face: 143 countries, over 1.3 million rooms, and a workforce that spans everything from corporate offices to front-line housekeeping.
And yet, the company achieved a 93% employee engagement rate while holding turnover at roughly half the hospitality industry average. That's not an accident.
CHRO Laura Fuentes (Executive Vice President, Chief Human Resources Officer and Hilton Supply Management at Hilton) explains Hilton's approach: everything is data-informed.
The company surveys team members at least twice a year, uses those results to shape its activities and programs, then surveys again to measure impact. It's a feedback loop, not a box-ticking exercise.
The most instructive engagement activity in Hilton's playbook is its Thrive at Hilton wellbeing program, a whole-person approach covering mind, body, and financial health that was launched in 2017 and embedded into the company's four-pillar cultural framework of purpose, growth, wellness, and inclusion.
Complementing this is DailyPay, a financial wellbeing benefit that allows US-based team members to access their earned wages before payday.
Initially skeptical, Fuentes said the data convinced her: it measurably improved retention, particularly among hourly workers for whom cash flow between paydays is a genuine stressor.
The company's Team Member Resource Groups (TMRGs) – covering women, Black employees, employees with disabilities, generational groups, and more – function not just as safe spaces but as genuine business advisory forums.
Hilton's CEO also sends biweekly messages to employees sharing stories from his property visits, a simple act of visible leadership that has helped bridge the gap between front-line staff and executive leadership.
The result: Hilton was ranked #2 on the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For in 2026, with 95% of employees saying it's a great place to work.
And if you haven't looked at financial wellbeing activities (earned wage access, financial planning support), that's a high-impact, underutilized lever for frontline and hourly workforces.
2. Adobe: The Kickbox innovation activity that turns employees into intrapreneurs
Adobe has spent more than two decades earning a place on Fortune's Best Workplaces list, and one of the most replicable reasons is a program called Kickbox.
This is a physical (now also digital) innovation kit given to any employee who has an idea they want to explore. Inside the kit is a small budget, a process guide, and the freedom to pursue the idea without needing management sign-off to get started.
Since its launch in 2013, roughly 10% of Adobe's workforce has used the Kickbox toolkit, and at least 23 ideas have gone on to receive further investment and become fully realized products.
The message this sends to employees is both simple and powerful: your ideas matter here, and we'll give you real resources to explore them, not just a suggestion box and a pat on the back.
What's instructive here isn't the specific mechanics of Kickbox, but the underlying principle.
Adobe has formalized psychological permission to experiment. Most organizations say they want innovation. Adobe built an activity that makes it structurally possible; that's a very different thing.
Their culture also emphasizes individual autonomy, with employees given the space to shape their own roles, take calculated risks, and grow professionally. Engagement through inspiration and trust rather than surveillance and control.
The key is creating actual permission to experiment, not just a policy that says it's allowed.
3. HubSpot: Radical transparency as a daily engagement activity
HubSpot's Culture Code (which became something of a phenomenon when it was first made public) is built on a premise that most organizations find uncomfortable: transparency is not optional.
The company shares financial information, strategic decisions, and sometimes inconvenient truths with employees in a way that would make many leadership teams sweat.
Their engagement activities reflect this philosophy at every level. A fully remote and hybrid-capable workforce is supported by inclusive scheduling and flexible arrangements that are structurally built in, not granted case-by-case.
HubSpot provides comprehensive mental health support including stress management resources and counseling. And crucially, normalizes their use rather than tucking them away in a benefits guide no one reads.
Continuous learning is embedded into how people work, with extensive certification programs and skill-building workshops that employees are actively encouraged to pursue.
What separates HubSpot from organizations that talk about transparency is that they make it an operational activity, not a value statement. When decisions get made, people understand why.
When the company faces challenges, employees hear about them from leadership, not from LinkedIn.
That kind of informational trust creates psychological safety, which research consistently identifies as one of the strongest drivers of team engagement.
Do your people understand why key decisions were made? Do they hear difficult news from you before they hear it elsewhere? Increasing transparency (even incrementally) builds the safety that drives engagement faster than most programmatic activities.
4. Barry-Wehmiller: A mid-size manufacturer that redefined what "success" means
If you haven't heard of Barry-Wehmiller, you're about to understand why people leaders who have are so evangelical about it.
The company (a privately held global manufacturer of industrial equipment, now operating at $3.6 billion in revenue following over 140 acquisitions) built its extraordinary growth on a philosophy that runs directly counter to conventional business wisdom: success is measured by the way we touch the lives of people.
“Chapman recognized that an organization where people feel valued, safe, and trusted will outperform one where people feel like interchangeable inputs; not because happy people are a nice idea, but because trust is the structural prerequisite for every behavior that drives innovation and growth.”
During the 2008 financial crisis, when revenue dropped sharply, Barry-Wehmiller chose furloughs over layoffs; asking everyone including leadership to share the burden rather than eliminating jobs.
When the economy recovered, the workforce was fully intact, morale was intact, and the company enjoyed some of its fastest growth in the years that followed.
Barry-Wehmiller's entire culture flows from one decision: measuring success by impact on people's lives, not just financial output.
Your definition of success is your operating system. If it only includes revenue metrics, your people strategy will always be downstream and underfunded.
5. Nick's Pizza & Pub: A small restaurant that out-engages the entire hospitality industry
The hospitality industry runs on a dirty secret: annual employee turnover regularly exceeds 150%.
So when a two-location pizza restaurant in Illinois achieves a retention rate of around 80%, people leaders from every industry take notice.
Nick's Pizza & Pub, founded by former construction worker Nick Sarillo, is built on what he calls a "trust-and-track" approach to management, the opposite of command-and-control.
Every employee starts above minimum wage. Profit-sharing means that if a restaurant hits four out of five goals, employees receive 80% of the profit-sharing pot.
There are no formal performance reviews; instead, feedback happens in the moment, at the end of each shift, with a simple question: what did you do well today?
Nick's was named to Forbes' Best Small Companies list and has become a case study in purpose-led, values-driven engagement that produces measurable business results, with profit margins often twice those of comparable pizza restaurants.
Sarillo now teaches other businesses his methods through the Trust & Track Institute.
When people can see the numbers and understand how their behavior affects them, they stop thinking like employees and start thinking like stakeholders. Skin in the game changes everything.
The common thread: What the best employee engagement activities actually share
Step back and look at this list as a whole, and a clear pattern emerges, one that cuts across company size, industry, and geography.
First, the best employee engagement activities are grounded in genuine care. The underlying message is the same: we see you as a whole person, and your wellbeing outside of work matters to us.
That message, consistently sent and consistently backed by action, creates the trust that powers engagement.
Second, they all listen continuously and act visibly. Feedback loops are short, responses are public, and employees can see the direct connection between what they said and what changed.
Third, they treat managers as the primary delivery mechanism. The organizations on this list invest heavily in their managers, not just with training, but with tools, frameworks, and cultural permission to lead like humans rather than enforcers.
And finally, the best engagement activities are sustainable, not spectacular. None of these companies built engagement on a single event or an annual off-site. They built it through daily habits, consistent norms, and a refusal to treat people as interchangeable inputs.
Teresa Garanhel
TL;DR: Building your own engagement activity calendar from these examples
You don't need to be Hilton or Adobe to run great employee engagement activities. What you need is intentionality, consistency, and a willingness to listen to your people and act on what you hear.
Engagement isn't a campaign, but a commitment. The companies doing it best haven't found a magic formula. They've just decided, repeatedly and consistently, to treat their people like people.
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