How to keep your team engaged when tomorrow feels uncertain.
by Tijs Besieux, PhD
In times when "tomorrow" feels unsettlingly unpredictable, leaders need to find ways to keep employees engaged so they work with conviction to create value for their customers.
And the research is compelling: employees who feel highly engaged— meaning they experience high energy, dedication, and absorption while working—outperform their peers, with correlations between work engagement and task performance exceeding 0.35.
Here are three evidence-based tips for leaders to fuel employee engagement, grounded in decades of research.
Tip 1: First, subtract what disengages people.
When trying to improve work engagement, leaders often default to adding: more feedback sessions, more development opportunities, more team rituals. But research shows that reducing job demands — overload, role ambiguity, emotional strain — drives engagement just as powerfully as adding resources.
The question worth asking: what is currently draining your team's energy that you could actually subtract? A redundant approval step. A meeting that produces no decisions. An unclear expectation that forces people to second-guess themselves.
Before you add fuel, consider addressing what's draining people's engagement today.
Tip 2: Connect people to meaning, not just tasks.
When engagement dips, leaders often reach for more structure or clearer priorities. But research consistently identifies meaning as the deepest driver of engagement. Not autonomy, or recognition. But, the sense that one's work contributes to something beyond the individual.
A helpful strategy: in your next one-on-one or team meeting, make the explicit link between what someone is working on and why it matters at a higher level. One powerful approach is to connect their work directly to the value it creates for the customer. As Peter Drucker put it, the purpose of a business is to create and serve a customer. When people see that chain clearly, from their daily work to a real person being helped, meaning follows naturally.
The task itself rarely kills engagement. Losing sight of its purpose does.
Tip 3: Your energy is contagious, whether you like it or not.
Leaders often think about engagement as something they need to build in others. The research suggests the starting point is closer to home.
Research identifies emotional contagion as one of the most direct pathways from leader to team: leaders automatically transmit their emotional state through tone, posture, and presence, an effect that is amplified by their visibility. On the other hand, research shows that leaders who micromanage, impede development, or disconnect work from its purpose don't just fail to engage their teams—they actively exhaust them.
Before your next team interaction, ask: What energy am I bringing into the room?
Leaders have more influence over their team's engagement than they often realize. In uncertain times, that influence is one of the most powerful gifts you can offer the people around you.
Sources:
Corbeanu, A., & Iliescu, D. (2023). The link between work engagement and job performance. Journal of Personnel Psychology, 22(3), 111–122.
Decuypere, A., & Schaufeli, W. B. (2020). Leadership and work engagement: Exploring explanatory mechanisms. German Journal of Human Resource Management, 34(1), 69–95.
Knight, C., Patterson, M., & Dawson, J. (2019). Work engagement interventions can be effective: A systematic review. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 28(3), 348–372.
Nikolova, I., Van Ruysseveldt, J., De Witte, H., & Syroit, J. (2019). Work-based learning and engagement. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 112, 1–11.
Schaufeli, W. B. (2021). Engaging leadership: How to promote work engagement. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 754556.Schaufeli, W. B., & Bakker, A. B. (2004). Job demands, job resources, and their relationship with burnout and engagement. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 25(3), 293–315.