As the year draws to a close and the December lull begins to loom, many HR and people leaders find themselves with a rare commodity: time to reflect. This quieter time before year-end offers the perfect opportunity to step back and reassess one of the most powerful levers of organisational success: employee engagement.
Rather than waiting for January to react to survey results or rising turnover, why not use this quieter period to reimagine what engagement will mean in 2026? Shifting employee expectations are redefining what connection, motivation, and loyalty look like. And it starts with employee benefits.
Why engagement needs a fresh look
Employee engagement is the emotional and psychological connection employees feel toward their work and organisation. But in a digital age, engagement has evolved from a nice-to-have to a measure of business resilience, retention, and growth.
Gallup’s State of the global workplace survey, published in June 2024, found that fewer than a quarter of employees are actively engaged at work. Global employee engagement declined to 21% in 2024; a staggering figure given disengagement costs the UK economy an estimated £257 billion annually.
The slower pace before year-end provides an ideal moment to take stock. It is a time for employers to ask: do our engagement initiatives still reflect what employees value most? Are our managers equipped to drive meaningful connection with employee benefits? Have our benefits, recognition, and feedback systems evolved alongside our workforce’s needs?
Too often, engagement strategies become static documents: reviewed once a year, detached from lived experience. But engagement is a dynamic, continuous process.
The benefits reset
Employee benefits are one of the most human parts of work. They represent care, belonging, and the promise of support. Yet too often, they are lost among corporate updates or reduced to an administrative process.
As a result, benefits become a tick-box exercise rather than a story that inspires engagement and satisfaction. Despite employers pouring investment into perks, the data tells a worrying story: awareness, satisfaction and understanding around employee benefits remain far lower than they should be.
The Gallup study found that 88% of employees say they are unhappy with their benefits: not because they are ungrateful, but because the messaging has not landed. Only one in ten can recall recent updates from their employer, and 64% struggle to understand what is on offer.
For many HR leaders, this raises a crucial question: is it that your benefits are not competitive, or that your people simply do not know about them?
Putting communication at the core
When employees understand what is on offer and why it matters, they are far more likely to take action. Tools like total reward statements are a great example. They pull everything together into one digital space where employees can see their true value.
Encourage leaders and peers to speak honestly about their experiences, leveraging connection through honesty.
Different colleagues process information differently; some prefer to read, others want to talk. Neurodivergent colleagues may need slower, smaller sessions or one-to-one follow-ups.
Use surveys and focus groups to ask, listen and adapt. Even better, involve employees themselves: invite those with lived experience to become benefits buddies or peer advocates. Empathy amplifies understanding, rather than diluting a message.
Where to focus for 2026
Reassess purpose and communication: employees crave authenticity and transparency. Seeing as the 2025 Drewberry Workplace satisfaction and employee benefits survey, published in October 2025, found that 40% of employees say bad internal communication makes them unhappiest at work, it is worth reviewing how leadership is communicating an organisation’s purpose to transform trust and alignment.
Invest in technology: HR teams can save time and work more strategically by rethinking how they manage benefits. Utilise an employee benefits platform to help teams understand the full value of their benefits, reducing repetitive questions and boosting engagement.
Make sure you measure up: are the employee benefits you set up a few years still an effective use of your budget? With only 12% of employees saying they are truly satisfied with their reward, according to Drewberry’s study, and more than a third willing to jump ship for better benefits, making a plan to benchmark your offering is a sensible way to start 2026.
Empower line managers. Drewberry’s study found that 55% of employees are happiest when trusted to manage their own workload, so plan for coaching, empathy, and feedback training, and managers will start 2026 ready to inspire rather than oversee.
Act on feedback, do not just collect it. Engagement surveys are valuable only when they lead to visible action. Use the quieter season to close feedback loops, showing employees that their voices lead to tangible improvements.
For example, enhanced workplace pension contributions, often overlooked as a mandatory tickbox, was the third most-wanted perk by employees in 2025, according to Drewberry’s Workplace satisfaction and employee benefits survey, and almost 60% would take bigger pensions over other benefits, according to the Drewberry Workplace pensions survey, published in May 2025. So while employers are reviewing budgets at the end of the year, they should consider where their budget could make the biggest impact.
Ask, then action. Because meeting employees where they are now is increasingly key to sustaining engagement.
Making reflection count
The most successful organisations treat engagement as a shared responsibility. Leadership sets the tone, managers bring it to life, and employees sustain it through participation and feedback.
So as we head into a season of mince pies and mulled-everything, while the pace slows and inboxes quieten, use the opportunity to pause: not to do less, but to think better. Revisit your engagement strategy with fresh eyes, grounded in data, empathy, and purpose.
The future of engagement is not about grand gestures or glossy campaigns. It is about designing everyday moments that remind employees why their work matters, and ensuring that by 2026, they still feel that way.
The sweet spot for 2026 lies in creating both comfort and challenge: a workplace where people are happy and inspired in equal measure.
Richard Noble is senior consultant, employee benefits at Brown and Brown Health and Employee Benefits
