Transcript: Engagement Hit a 15-Year High. So Why Are 39% Still Disengaged? // Doug Waldo, Best Christian Workplaces

Doug: When we look at something like this, we would say the state of the Christian workplace is strong and getting stronger, and we praise God for that. When we see this sort of positive movement, and now being sustained three years in a row, with the biggest jump being the most recent, I think that’s evidence of the Spirit at work, and we celebrate that.

Narrator: This is the Called to Flourish podcast, where leaders and cultures grow.

Robert: Welcome to the Called to Flourish podcast, where leaders and cultures grow. My name is Robert Wachter. I’m the head of Marketing and Sales here at Best Christian Workplaces. Today we have Dr. Doug Waldo on the program with us. Dr. Doug Waldo is our Research Director and Senior Consultant here at Best Christian Workplaces. Welcome to the program, Doug.

Doug: Hey. Thank you for having me.

Robert: My pleasure. So, Doug has 30 years of strategic leadership, organizational economics, and workplace research. He not only is an expert in this space, but he’s also involved in just the practical side of ministry. He’s served on boards, at a variety of schools, you know elder boards at his church, those kinds of things, so he’s very familiar with not only the research component of engagement, but also what it means to be building healthy workplace cultures, interpreting the data, and putting them into action, so we are very excited to have him on the program today. We’re going to be talking about our Annual State of the Christian Workplace Report today, so we – every year we aggregate our data and we look at, how is the overall – what is the overall state of the Christian workplace report? How are we doing sector by sector when we aggregate all of the data together? And so that’s what we’re excited to talk about today, and there are some really key things that we want to kind of dig into, what the data is showing us in our annual report. By the way, you can go to workplaces.org and pick up that report. It’s free, and you can check out, you know, what the data showed in the year 2025. But Doug, I’d love to just kind of start off with it because you know our audience is mixed with all kinds of folks. Some may hear engagement, like engagement survey. What does that even mean? Is this just some sort of HR fluff, right? Can you explain, in very practical terms, what do we mean by employee engagement? Why does it matter?

Doug: We will take the fluff right out of that. So very early on in the State of the Christian Workplace Report, we asked the question, what if everyone brought their best to work every day? I think that is the question, and it’s also an answer to your question regarding engagement. We think of it being a voluntary, discretionary investment, the employee makes in his or her work, so bringing their best every day, and there are really four indicators that we look for that instead speak to engagement from a practical perspective. So it’s energy level, so it’s the active - it’s vitality, the vigor that a person brings to their work, it’s their enthusiasm, sort of the emotional charge they get from being involved in mission-connected work. Then there’s commitment, wanting to be part of something long term. Do they see themselves as part of the future of the organization? And then finally, the passion, the drive to go above and beyond to advance the mission. It’s a personal deep connection to the mission. So when all four of those things are in place, we say they’re indicative of engagement, and that person is able to say, “I can bring my best to my work every day.” There are all sorts of implications that come along with that, but certainly there is a multiplier when we can have multiple people on a team or in a department who can say that. They can say that they have energy, enthusiasm, and commitment and passion. If they can bring that to their work every day, then mission moves.

Robert: You’re talking about there are multiple implications to that, kind of, overall idea of engagement. In the report, the State of the Christian Workplace Report, you’ll see that we focused in on, kind of, three of those, which I think may encompass all of them. Correct me if I’m wrong, Doug, but we were looking at financial. There’s a financial implication directly connected to the percentage of engaged employees at any organization. There is a missional, kind of, component, kind of impact – kingdom impact, but also how it just affects people. People who are called as leaders to shepherd, to care for - how it impacts their own lives, not only professionally, vocationally, but also personally. Do you want to speak into any of that?

Doug: Yeah. I think you’re right. They are all closely related. I think for the most part leaders think of the financial implications first because it’s more practical, it’s more readily observable, and we know, back to those four indicators, when they’re all there, when the employee feels like they can bring their best, that multiplier effect is measurable as well. The research seems to show that between one and a quarter to as much as one and a third higher capacity when an employee is engaged in their work, so you can imagine if you’ve got six people who are fully engaged, they can do the work of eight people. I mean, that does not mean they’re workaholics. We’re not trying to promote workaholism. But they’ve got additional capacity because you’ve got six people who are bringing energy, enthusiasm, commitment, and passion to their work. There’s a huge financial implication and a capacity implication for what I can do. Even with a relatively small team or department, if they’re highly engaged, they can do the work of a lot more folks. BCW is a great example of that. We’re not a large organization, but the impact of this organization is very far reaching because we’re highly engaged, and so we see that every day. Now if you look at the mission piece, I’m always very excited to talk about that because when we think about the word “engagement”, particularly the non-fluffy part of that, we are very literally meaning engaged in the mission. They feel a deep sense of connection to it, and they’re bringing their energy into all those indicators again to a specific mission, so in a very real sense – and I do this with our ministry partners often, especially in a training context, I’ll say, “write your mission statement down.” Look at that mission statement, whatever that is, however you have defined the success of this endeavor, you cannot reach it without your employees being engaged. So there are very clear implications for the mission and then finally to the people, the implications for people themselves. We know in our context especially, there is a theological or a kingdom perspective to our work and to the conversation around engagement. There are specific verses that we quote all the time. In fact, in the State of the Christian Workplace Report we talk about Proverbs 27:23 – “Know well the condition of your flock, pay attention to your herd or give attention to your herd.” Now we know that verse was written in a farming, shepherding, agrarian context, but there is a lot we can learn there. There’s a ton of wisdom in there for a leader. I am charged with knowing as a leader the condition of those that God has placed under my care. Beyond the financial and capacity building implications, beyond the mission connection, I have an obligation from a King that I am stewarding the people that He has placed under my care, and if I go a little bit further, Ephesians 2:10 says each one of those folks was handcrafted by Him with perfect intentionality since before the beginning of the world. While the heavy burden that comes with – as a leader, knowing that and recognizing the implications of that and stewarding it, and then finally Romans 12:8, it says if we are to lead, we’re to lead with diligence and with zeal. So this conversation about engagement, far from being fluffy, we have a mandate, I believe, and a heavy burden and there is a kingdom perspective on that. I’ll give you one more finding. This is not from our research, but I just actually found this yesterday. I was doing some work for a training event coming up. This one hits on all three of these elements. Did you know that before an employee makes the decision to voluntarily turnover from a job, so before they choose to disengage from their work, they begin to show those markers that we talked about, and they show them as early as eight months before they actually pull the trigger on it, and the drop is not insignificant. It’s a 29% drop, so the idea of measuring this engagement on a regularly-occurring basis allows us sometimes to see that employee move from engaged to neutral before they even have made that decision themselves. We can begin to see it and we can begin to take action to bring them back into the fold.

Robert: So there’s time if you’re part of the cadence and you prioritize engagement, culture, looking at real data, because the data takes the guesswork out of this work. So, you know, I think sometimes maybe it’s the Christian leader – I’m probably guilty of this, having done some pastor work in my previous roles in life as a pastor - over spiritualizing things, trusting in the leading of the Holy Spirit, which of course we want to do that, but data is a very practical, real way, and God can work within that data and the Holy Spirit can illuminate things through that data to give leaders insight. So we always say, data is your best friend as a leader. I want to speak to probably the highlight of the entire State of the Christian Workplace Report, which is actually a very strong, positive signal, and that is when we aggregate all of our data together – so we surveyed in 2025 over 450 Christian-led organizations. Over 40,100 employees were part of those surveys, so that is the aggregate, and we saw that 61% of employees at Christian-led organizations that we surveyed were engaged, 61% were engaged, and so, I’d love for you, Doug, to speak into that a little bit. What does this mean for the State of the Christian Workplace Report, or how should I be processing that if I’m a leader, leading the Christian-led organization?

Doug: Yeah. That’s a great question. We think – we often talk about a score, a score on a five-point scale, and it’s incredibly helpful, but this number, the percent engaged, these are actually brothers and sisters in Christ who are coming to work every day with a sense of engagement in a mission, like we just talked about, so this is very exciting. You also think about the trajectory that we’re on. If you look back over the 15-year period during which we’ve been gathering this information regularly, we looked specifically at 2023 when we were at 58%, in 2024 at 59%, and then now at 61%. There is this moment in the U.S. State of the Union address when the U.S. President will say something like the state of the country is strong, or the state of the nation is strong. When we look at something like this, we would say the state of the Christian workplace is strong and getting stronger, and we praise God for that. We often say, sort of tongue in cheek, but not really, whenever you get a bunch of sinners together in any endeavor, we should not expect flourishing. So when we see this sort of positive movement, and now being sustained three years in a row, with the biggest jump being the most recent, I think that’s evidence of the Spirit at work, and we celebrate that, and there are an awful lot of conversations happening that weren’t happening two or three years ago, meaning we have a lot of new ministry partners joining us in this pursuit. A lot of the organizations that you mentioned, who were invited, were not part of this conversation just two years ago. Now here’s sort of the wrinkle behind this that’s even more impressive. Most of the time the very first survey a ministry partner does with us is not their highest score. They’re just developing a benchmark or a baseline, and then we work with them, and we move that needle for them.

Robert: Yes.

Doug: So, if you think about with 61% - up 2% - it’s probably hiding in even bigger story and that is a lot of those are brand new, and we’re going to continue prayerfully, Lord willing, to see that move to the right – that needle move overall to the right, and that’s very exciting. Let me share a bigger picture reason for this excitement. I think we’ve covered this in the report pretty well. But if you take the number of employees that we estimate are involved in the Christian-led workplace – this is beyond everyone who surveys with us – but just all the employees who report to work every day in a Christian-led workplace, that’s about 6.5 million people. Now we want them to all survey with us, but they’re not all there yet, but 6.5 million. If you take a 2% improvement in that many people, that’s 130,000 newly engaged brothers and sisters in Christ this year who wouldn’t have been engaged last year, and with that multiplier that we talked about, the cost difference, the capacity building, that’s north of $2 billion dollars in additional capacity being invested in the kingdom. I don’t know what would be more exciting than that.

Narrator: Leading well starts with listening well. At Best Christian Workplaces, our Employee Engagement Survey helps you collect honest, anonymous feedback from your staff so you can lead with clarity. When you understand what drives team engagement, you retain top talent, increase productivity, reduce turnover, and uncover cost savings. We equip Christian leaders with research-driven insight to strengthen culture and lead with purpose. Because when your people flourish your mission impact multiples. Visit workplaces.org to learn more today.

Robert: Wow. To put this into perspective for our listeners, 61% of engaged employees is the highest percentage of engagement that we have seen in our data, I believe it’s historically, but I’d say for at least the past 10 years, so we are seeing a very positive signal there, and again, to your point, it doesn’t really tell the whole story because what we’re seeing is that as you engage in your culture, as you implement strategies, as you really assess the data and move on the data with actionable steps, the bigger story is that there’s a higher percentage of engagement for those who have surveyed year over year, taken that feedback seriously, and are actively engaged in moving the needle in a positive direction, so yeah. Then the other side of that, the other side of the coin, are the 39% of non-engaged employees, so, if you think about it, 39%, that’s . . . 61% in the context, the broader context, is a very strong number, for those who understand employee engagement, that is a very strong number. Having said that, that still leaves 39% of employees, across the board, on average according to our data, that are not engaged, which - Doug, can you speak into kind of the organizational drag that causes or maybe the financial impact of that? You’re already touching on it, but what does that mean, if I think about it? In my organization, on average, it could be roughly 40% of employees, brothers and sisters in Christ that are not engaged.

Doug: Yeah. We often ask that when we do training events. We’ll throw out that number, and sometimes there will be applause – only 61%. Most folks know about the annual Gallop number that gets publicized highly about the percent of engaged employees in the U.S. workplace - obviously that’s a secular workplace model - being around what, 31% to 32%, so they hear 61% and they’re like, “wow, that’s amazing,” and it is amazing, but to your point, that leaves about 4 in 10 brothers and sisters in Christ who report to a kingdom-minded organization and say, I can’t bring my best to work today, or I can’t bring it consistently every day, and there are certain obstacles. Of course, that’s part of the survey conversation is to unpack – what are those obstacles and how can we equip a ministry partner to move those? And the implications for not moving are – yeah, the implications for not moving them would be just like what we talked about a moment ago. They are financial. We know that the capacity difference between an engaged employee and a non-engaged employee is just shy of $20,000 a year. The actual number is $19,680, meaning an employee who cannot bring their full energy, enthusiasm, commitment, and passion to their work creates a drain or a drag on the organization, and of course, that has to be made up by the colleagues around them, and we feel that. We have all at one point worked alongside someone who was disengaged from the work. Hopefully, we have never been that person, but odds are we’ve worked next to that person, and if you’ve got one or more in a team, obviously there is a huge implication for that. When you think of how far reaching that is, there are some studies to show that for every non-engaged employee, they impact eight to 10 of their colleagues every day. So that $19,680 is probably a pretty conservative number. It might even be higher. There is a huge implication that way, and here’s where the leader sees it and feels it most. We talked a moment ago, if you have a team of six people who are fully engaged, and they seem like they can do the work of eight, well, what if you’ve got a group of six people and even one is disengaged? Well now you’ve probably got capacity of four and a half or five, and we call that sort of “the silent vacancy.” There’s - the amount of capacity or what we can accomplish for the mission is not the same when we’re disengaged, so that four in 10 number, in the most Christ-centered way possible – we wouldn’t be greedy - we want better than that. We want to continue our work to move from 61% to higher because we know those are folks who – they want it. You know, we see that in our neutrals. We can – we ask a question about their motivation to go above and beyond, and overwhelmingly the neutrals will say, “I’m highly motivated to go above and beyond, but there’s an obstacle or obstacles.” And if we can remove it, they engage.

Robert: Absolutely. Amen to that. I always like to point out, to underscore what you just said, Doug, is that when we’re talking about the percentage of non-engaged employees, we’re not saying that that employee is just not a good employee, that that employee is just – chooses to be nonproductive or less productive. What we’re really saying is – that might be true in a sense, but we’re talking about kind of the overall organizational drag. In other words, there are barriers that are put into place. Senior leadership, top leadership, is ultimately responsible to create an environment that puts the wind in the sails of the employees so that things like communication issues, where there’s a meeting after the meeting, a sense that something is not communicated well, so there becomes an organizational drag that happens not because an employee just doesn’t want to do the work, or just doesn’t want to show up, but really there are these barriers that are created that can create a lack of passion, of course, a lack of passion, enthusiasm, and that, but also, there are other ways that that just slows everything down, and then overall there is less horsepower in that organization to create that kingdom outcome that we’re looking for. When we’re talking about those barriers, we did see some points in the data that we can touch on, because we do have a few more minutes, we can touch on those. But I would say, as we look at these potential barriers that we saw in the data, it’s very important for leaders of organizations to understand that when we aggregate the data across all sectors that does not mean that this represents the idiosyncrasies of your particular organization. We’re seeing some themes and some trends, but the only way to really understand what is going on underneath the hood of engagement and barriers in your organization is to actually survey, to hear the direct feedback from your employees so you can have very customized aggregate and de-aggregated data within your organization to understand, where are we and where do we go from here? Having said that, Doug, I’d love for you to speak into some of the overall themes that we saw, which are kind of lower, eroding trust between leaders and staff, kind of lack of involvement of staff in decisions that affect them, employees that feel that their ideas and feedback are not heard or acted upon. I think all of those three got into the podcast because we have a little bit of an internet glitch there, but Doug, could you just speak to some of those barriers that were uncovered in terms of the pressure points in the State of the Christian Workplace Report?

Doug: Yeah. I think they all sort of coalesce around this theme of trust. There’s the overt recognition of trust. We have an item specifically that talks about trust between leaders and employees and when we look at that, it’s not primarily or exclusively, do employees trust leaders? It’s also the sense of, do I feel trusted by my leader? And so, we look at some of the ingredients that impact trust. We look at that in the data and we see it from three angles. First, it’s more of a Christlikeness character type trust. We have a heavy emphasis in some of our more powerful drivers of engagement on Christlikeness specifically. We call that inspirational leadership. That’s generally not the concern. Generally speaking when, we see lower trust, you look at the Christlike character attributes of leadership, those typically are pretty high, so we have to go to the next layer. I can trust the character of the person at the helm, you know, steering the ship. That doesn’t mean I trust that that they’ve got this under control, that we’re managing the situation well, especially if I can feel the wind and the waves rocking the boat. So we look at the competence and we look at things like, how do we reward and recruit and promote and retain top talent? We look at how we pay people. We look at the strategic plan. Do we have an effective strategy? Do we have clarity and consensus on where we’re going? And you see a lot of softness across some sectors on those specific items. They speak to trust and just a vote of confidence that the situation is being managed well, especially in a turbulent environment. Then finally, the connection piece, and really the connection piece hits on the other themes that we saw in this year’s data. So the connection piece is, I can trust the character of the people at the helm. I can even trust that they know what they’re doing. But if I ever see them and hear from them and don’t think they tend to want to hear from me, that trust can be impacted by a lack of connection, and here’s where we’re seeing a lot across the sectors where there’s an increasing sense of employees wanting a voice, and in Christian workplaces especially, where – and this is a wonderful thing – there is a high sense of agency. In a Christian-led organization, there is a strong sense of ownership in the mission. After all, you’ve been handcrafted for it, and you’re in a kingdom-minded enterprise, so you’re investing what God’s given you in that work, a strong sense of agency then. Well, with that, the flip side of that then is, they expect a fairly strong representation in a decision-making process. They expect to be heard from. They expect leaders to want to give them voice. We’re, of course, seeing that, and in the data specifically and some trends that we’re beginning to see, as the Baby Boomer generation is beginning to retire from the workplace and you’re seeing the younger generation come into the workplace, there is a significant shift happening and that emphasis on voice where the younger generation expects a much greater sense of voice in both directions, meaning hearing from leaders and being heard by leaders.

Robert: Wow. This is incredibly fascinating, and my hope for those listening right now, that it has enticed your curiosity to go to workplaces.org and you’ll find – it’s forward slash - /socw – State of the Christian workplace – /socw-2026. (workplaces.org/sowc-2026). You can get the report. You’ll find it all over our website, so you don’t need to remember. Just workplaces.org and you can go get that report for free. So, we really want to encourage to do that so you can dig into the data a little bit, see what the trends are, see what’s going on. We’ll leave it at that. I think there’s a lot for our audience to chew on for this episode. Dr. Doug Waldo, I want to thank you for being on the program, but I do have two quick rapid-fire questions. We like to do this from time to time just to have a little fun and just to learn more about you, because . . .

Doug: I think the data is fun too, but . . . .

Robert: Well, you make it fun, Doug, because you’re so passionate and articulate with our data. But I just want to ask a couple random, personal questions just to learn more about you. Okay. And one of them is – this is just completely silly and random – but very interesting as well. Doug, are you a data dashboard kind of person or a whiteboard brainstorming kind of person?

Doug: Whiteboard brainstorming. I’ve got it right in front of me.

Robert: Ooh.

Doug: The data is fascinating to me, but if you want to see my energy, enthusiasm, passion, and commitment, give me a whiteboard and let’s do something with this, whether it’s product development, creating new content, new services, that’s where I light up.

Robert: That is a powerful two-punch combo - is a data person who is a brainstormer and an idea person. Amazing. One more question, smoke or grill or classic charcoal barbeque?

Doug: Smoker, all day long. Give me real wood, a brisket, 14 hours, and a lot of coffee and a rocking chair.

Robert: I love it.

Doug: That’s my happy place, and if you can throw in a whiteboard while I’m sitting there . . .

Robert: Hey, best of both worlds! Whiteboard and barbeque.

Doug: Not that I’ve ever done that before.

Robert: Yeah. I’ve got to get out to Florida and see you, Doug, because I want some barbeque.

Doug: All the smoke.

Robert: There’s a lot of it in Texas though, so I’ve got more.

Doug: You’re up to speed.

Robert: Well, hey, to our audience, God bless you all. I want to encourage you to follow our podcast. Subscribe to it so you get this information on a regular basis, but also like it, share it, send it to a friend, a colleague, somebody you think would be helped out and inspired by this information because we do deeply care about Christian-led organizations setting the standard as the best, most effective places to work in the world. So on that note, God bless you. Dr. Doug Waldo, thank you for being on the program, and to all of you, we’ll see you next time.

Doug: Thank you.