The workforce risk that doesn’t show up in your engagement survey

In March 2026, the ActivTrak Productivity Lab published its annual State of the Workplace report—a snapshot of 443 million hours of work activity across 1,111 organisations and 163,638 employees over three years. As we enter the second half of the year, two findings from our report have only grown more relevant: a shift in the dominant workforce health risk, and a more complicated picture of engagement than the headline numbers suggest. Both have direct implications for decisions HR leaders are making right now.

What our data shows about the workplace in 2026

In 2026, workdays are slightly shorter, productive hours are up, and collaboration surged 34%. AI adoption hit 80%, and time spent in AI tools increased eightfold.

What many hoped would reduce the workload has had the opposite effect. AI adoption does not shrink work; it amplifies it. Among a subset of 10,584 users comparing behaviour 180 days before and after AI adoption, time spent across every measured work category increased. Email rose by 104%, chat and messaging by 145%, and business management by 94%. Work is accelerating—but not uniformly.

The unevenness has a direct workforce health consequence. Positively, burnout risk fell 22% and now impacts only 5% of employees. Concerningly, disengagement rose 23% and now affects nearly one in four. For disengaged employees, the problem is not too much work. It is too little.

What is disengagement, and how does it differ from burnout?

The lab defines disengagement as an employee who falls below a certain productive-hours threshold for more than 75% of the year. The lab defines burnout as an employee who spends more than 75% of their time in an overutilised state annually. Burnout is ongoing overload; disengagement is chronic underutilisation.

In a low-hire, low-fire environment, disengaged employees stay. Capacity drain and retention risks accumulate invisibly until employees show up as unexpected turnover or performance gaps. HR leaders who invested in reducing overload and saw results now need to ask a separate question. If nearly one in four employees are working below expected capacity even as work keeps expanding, where are those hours going?

Why employee perception on disengagement matters

Disengagement remains invisible in the tools most HR teams use to measure health. That is likely because of a perception gap. Employees may feel comfortable self-reporting burnout in engagement surveys or 1:1s because it signals effort and commitment. But an employee is unlikely to tell their manager they are disengaged and working below capacity unless they trust their manager would not treat it as a performance issue. In many cases, an employee might not even have the data or awareness that they are underutilised.

The perception gap creates a mismatch between diagnosis and treatment. Burnout responds to load reduction and wellness initiatives. Disengagement does not—it requires redeployment and recalibration of work.

Steps towards reengaging your workforce

These steps work at two levels: what HR leaders can do today with existing resources, and what to build towards as workforce health data visibility improves.

1. Share data with employees from the start

The instinct is often to bring utilisation data to managers first and employees second. Reverse that sequence in intent, if not always in timing. For leaders with utilisation data, employees should know from the outset what is being measured and how it will be used. For leaders without it, the principle still holds: Be transparent with employees about which signals you are tracking—whether that is tenure in role, performance review patterns or manager observation—and what the goal is. When employees understand what is being measured and why, the conversation shifts from evaluation to collaboration.

2. Bring disengagement numbers to managers

Behavioural data identifies who is underutilised, not why. Drilling down to root causes requires context you may not have. Bring the report’s disengagement figure to managers and ask: Does this match what you are observing? For leaders without utilisation data, the conversation serves as a starting point. If leaders have utilisation data, group managers by patterns within their teams to spot blind spots. “Your team’s utilisation distribution looks like this; here’s how it compares to peers.” Benchmarking surfaces what is invisible in isolation.

3. Teach managers what the data means before they use it

Disengagement in this context is not a judgement—it is a data point that someone’s hours are consistently below what the role expects over an extended period. That framing matters. A manager who leads with “the data shows you’re disengaged” will get a different conversation than one who asks, “I want to make sure your workload reflects what you’re here to do—can we talk about it?” For leaders without access to behavioural data, the signal may be subtler—an employee who used to raise their hand and no longer does, or one whose output has quietly plateaued.

READ MORE: From engagement to mindfulness: Why the real productivity crisis is invisible

4. Train managers to lead with curiosity, not correction

When a manager sees an employee’s data showing underutilisation, the first move should be curiosity, not correction. Nearly one in four employees working below expected capacity signals an unwelcome change—perhaps a protective pullback after burnout, a misaligned role, unclear direction or work that does not match their strengths. This data gives managers a reason to ask what is happening and move forward from there. In 1:1s, managers should ask diagnostic questions: “What would feel like a good use of your skills right now?” or “Does your work align with your skills?”

An opportunity arises

Work is accelerating. The organisations managing this well are not necessarily the most technologically sophisticated—they are the ones having honest conversations about workforce health. For years, reducing burnout was the right priority. But freed capacity that organisations do not redeploy fosters disengagement. The second half of 2026 is the right moment for HR leaders to ask whether the work their wellbeing programmes freed up actually went somewhere purposeful—and to build the systems to find out if it did not.

About the Author:

Sarah Altemus is Productivity Lab Manager at ActivTrak, where she contributes to research and advisory efforts focused on work intelligence in the AI era.

This article was first published on HR Executive.