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Employee Engagement

Mikaela Cohen

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And, if that laughter is shared among colleagues, it can help boost productivity and engagement, according to Adam Christing, speaker and author of 

The Laughter Factor: The 5 Humor Tactics to Link, Lift, and Lead

Christing shared with HR Brew how people pros can encourage more laughter in the workplace.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Management and leadership is all about trust and connection, and that positive humor is a shortcut to trust. We feel closer working with people where we’re enjoying each other, and laughter is like a bridge that really connects hearts. Times are so challenging, and chaotic, and unpredictable, if we can laugh together, we can get through anything.

Did the book change from when you started writing it to when it was published?

I started off focused more on things that science keeps showing us. That laughter literally physically reduces stress, releases endorphins…But what struck me as I did deeper research was how studies are also showing that it creates cohesion.

One of my five humor tactics is called “in-jokes”...when we create this shared humor about our group and about our people. What surprised me in my research is the link between playfulness and productivity. We feel less judged. We feel more free to fail when we can laugh at ourselves and laugh with our colleagues.

First one is surprise, and I call it “SAD.” You actually want your people to be sad, and by that I mean you want to “surprise and delight” them. Another one is called poke. This is the trickiest of [them]—I also call these the five laugh languages—You want your humor to be sharp enough to pop a balloon, but never to break a heart. And, so the key on poke is really learning if managers and HR leaders can learn the power of self-effacing humor where you really make fun of yourself.

Word play, and that’s for the lovers of dad jokes, and puns, and clever quips, and when you find someone on your team who’s really into that, you can have so much fun…The last one is called amplify, and this is the power of exaggerating stories and situations. A professional comedian might call this ranting…It just becomes dramatic and funny, and so this one applies most to people who are good at telling stories.

How can HR leaders find humor if it doesn’t come naturally to them?

It’s a real misnomer when people say, “I don’t have a sense of humor.” Every human being has a sense of humor. In fact, I put it this way, I say, not only do you have a sense of humor, but a sense of humor has you. The challenge is, when we think of laughter, we think of like the comedian on the Netflix special or the comedy club, and you don’t have to be a professional comedian to tap into your laugh language.

The first thing is to find your funny. Usually, what makes you laugh is a good indication of your own sense of humor. So, if you’re really into dad jokes, it might be that you love word play. If you’re really into receiving a surprise, like if somebody throws you a surprise party or brings you an unexpected gift, chances are that’s also your go-to way of being funny is surprise.

For HR leaders, it’s also key to listen your way into laughter instead of trying to talk your way in. And, by that, I mean notice in meetings, notice in email exchanges, what other people are saying or doing that creates fun and enjoy that. Like, you don’t have to be up there like the life of the party, but if you draw out their humor and their fun side, you’re really more, asa leader, an orchestrator than an entertainer.

Two hands holding on opened book with text highlighted

An interview with Adam Christing, author of ‘The Laughter Factor’

“What surprised me in my research is the link between playfulness and productivity. We feel less judged. We feel more free to fail when we can laugh at ourselves and laugh with our colleagues.”

How laughter can boost employee productivity and engagement

When was the last time you were productive for eight hours straight? (No need to lie, we’re all friends here! We know it’s probably been a long time…)

If it makes you feel any better, just 18% of global workers 

 by Kickresume in July said they’re productive for seven to eight hours a day. Another 39% reported being productive for five to six hours, while 29% said the same for three to four hours. Makes you wonder why the work day is still eight hours, right?

“The premise of the eight-hour workday itself is already kind of unrealistic, like people aren’t actually working for eight hours straight, non-stop, with no breaks, with no unfocused time,” said Ashley Janssen, a productivity consultant at her consulting firm.

After the Industrial Revolution, manual laborers often logged at least 12-hour shifts and 80-hour workweeks. But as the labor movement grew in the 1920s, the idea of the eight-hour workday was born and embraced.

But the challenge with the eight-hour workday, Janssen told HR Brew, is that it was designed for manual work and may not align with knowledge work, and the problem-solving and creativity required to do it productively.

“An organization has never really tried anything else…that’s the norm, and there’s never been any push to change it,” Janssen said. “Even though it actually doesn’t suit the kind of work that knowledge workers do.”

When Janssen consults on employee productivity, she said she has leaders and employees to “map out what an average week in their life looks like,” including tasks like getting dressed, cooking, commuting, running errands, and attending appointments.

“Most people are shocked, because they actually see a visual of what’s actually happening over the course of each day…and funny enough, it’s actually probably that five or six hours is where the gaps are,” Janssen said. “Their expectations that they’re going to be able to get all of these things done over the course of their ‘eight- or nine-hour day’ versus all the things they’re trying to jam in, which were actually not even possible to begin with.”

HR pros can help employees set reasonable expectations for their workday, she said, by thinking of juggling their personal and professional tasks like “juggling plastic and glass balls.”

“We’re all juggling 55 balls every day, and some of them are as simple as making lunch in the morning all the way to a big project that’s due for work, and sometimes you have to drop some balls,” she said. “What are the plastic balls? What are the ones that, if we drop them, it’s okay. They’re not going to break…versus the idea of the glass ball that if you drop that ball, something’s going to happen. It’s going to break. It’s going to hurt a relationship. It’s going to hurt a reputation.”

It all boils down to being intentional and thoughtful when prioritizing what can be achieved in a day, Janssen said.

Most employees aren’t productive the whole workday. HR can help them get the most out of it.

The eight-hour workday is so two millennia ago.

Adam DeRose

HR teams are reprioritizing performance management, according to a new report from Lattice, which happens to be a performance management and engagement platform.

Performance management displaced employee engagement as the top priority for the first time in six years, according to the 2026 State of People Strategy Report released Wednesday.

“If you do a look back, there’s been so much fluctuation between priorities and [the] state of business between, Covid: send everybody home, bring everybody back; be woke, don’t be woke. There’s been this whiplash effect, and what we’re seeing now is stabilization into the back-to-business basics,” Lattice CEO Sarah Franklin told HR Brew.

The report found that 40% of HR pros globally say performance management is their firm’s top priority heading into 2026.

“Performance management is the end state of all of the business basics, which start with plan setting, goal setting, regular performance check-ins, regular communication,” Franklin said, adding that it’s a return to those core business components and then measuring against those for success.

The report suggests engagement is not an opposing priority, but a “twin star” with performance. Employee engagement remains key, with 39% prioritizing it.

Engagement impacts performance, and retaining high performers is achieved through good employee engagement, everyday, not just twice a year during listening campaigns. The seemingly competing priorities actually complement one another for high performing teams.

“You want to know that your top performers are engaged, and you want to understand [your] risk of losing them,” Franklin said. “You want to make sure that they are engaged, that they are well managed and have great opportunity.”

Franklin told HR Brew that high performing organizations are looking to other signals to understand employee engagement, and leveraging platforms like Lattice to make actionable sense of those signals.

People leaders are also looking to AI to help scale HR programs that level-up the workforce.

“I talk to people teams all the time, every day, and there’s definitely a comfort with it. It was more scary before now, and that’s the fluency,” she said of AI use in the department. “Then, also, the deeper understanding of how it can be helpful in scaling their function.”

The more people leaders leverage AI to scale their talent development strategy and to automate rote work, the more their organizations will reap the productivity gains high performing orgs are discovering, she said.

HR teams are prioritizing performance management in the year ahead, new report finds

As companies return to “business basics,” performance management tops HR’s to-do list.

A new buzzword has hit the collective consciousness.

“Quiet cracking” describes the feeling of increased disengagement and unhappiness among employees who, amid a weakened labor market, feel stuck at work, Business Insider 

. More than half of employees feel unhappy at work either frequently (20%) or occasionally (34%), 

 from learning management system company TalentLMS found.

While employee dissatisfaction isn’t new, economic turmoil, AI uncertainty, and return-to-office mandates have pushed the workforce into this new era, according to Rishad Tobaccowala, futurist, business leader, and author of 

“Right now, [employees] are basically saying, ‘This sucks, but there’s nothing I can do about it,’ so that’s why you have this quiet cracking going on,” Tobaccowala told HR Brew.

Employees are in “a diametrically opposite position” from where they were during the Great Resignation, Tobaccowala said. They went from commuting to the office five days a week pre-Covid, to having flexibility and autonomy during the pandemic, to now being expected to return to the 2019 workplace, and it’s giving them whiplash, he added.

“Three years ago, we were re-imagining work…We were thinking about how we fit work into life,” Tobaccowala said. “Two years later, we find ourselves in this ‘incredible’ world where it’s gone back to, ‘You will come back to work, whether you like it. If you don’t, we will kick you out of your job.’”

Employees are also experiencing whiplash when it comes to their mobility. Many companies went on hiring sprees around 2021, only to revert to layoffs by 2023, he said.

“In every way, the control has gone back to the company…We have much less, far less flexibility, because you have to deal with high prices, high real estate costs, high food costs,” he said. “In 2021, you thought there was a new world of work, and, in 2025, it’s worse than 2019.”

 HR professionals, Tobaccowala said, should remember the pendulum will eventually swing back in the favor of employees.

“[Employees] are basically saying we are locked, because we don’t like what’s happening, but we need to buy some time. We have to figure out how to save some money. We need to figure out how to build our networks. We need to figure out how to leverage technology,” he said. “We need to figure out how we show up, and work, and do things on the side, and then when we’re ready, we’re ready to go.”

In anticipation, Tobaccowala recommended people leaders focus on offering flexibility and personalization at work.

“While in-person interaction is important, you don’t need to basically have it three days a week. You can get away with three days a month, or even 10 days a quarter,” he said. “Younger people may need to be more at work for training or to be with each other. Middle-aged people with parents to look after and kids to look after have to move far away for better schools and affordable housing…You talk about being agile and flexible, but you don’t do that with your talent?”

Employees are disengaged and biding their time until they can quit

…as evident by the latest (alarming) workplace trend, “quiet cracking.”

Employee engagement strategies have long been a talking point for companies, but might be more useless than you think.

That’s because many companies are implementing strategies to gauge employee engagement in the wrong way, according to Mark C. Crowley, author of 

The Power of Employee Well-Being: Move Beyond Engagement to Build Flourishing Teams

, which will be published in late September. In his book, Crowley suggests how HR teams can reframe their attention to improving employee well-being instead.

“It’s time to stop talking about engagement,” Crowley told HR Brew. “Like nobody’s calling it out, and we still go through the exercise of focusing on engagement, talking about engagement, and there’s just no reason to continue to do that.”

Crowley shared more insights from his book in an interview with HR Brew.

What will HR pros learn after reading your book?

Measuring engagement has always been really super complicated, because there’s 

 has always asked. So, if you get bad scores, you have to isolate one of 12 different things. So, you could say, “Well, we don’t know whether people feel that they have a friend at work, or we don’t know whether people feel that they have clarity on what the job expectations are. We don’t know that people feel valued.” So, it’s Whac-a-Mole…[Engagement] simply boils down to how people feel at work, and you don’t have to ask them 12 different questions.

You just have to ask them, “How do you feel at work this week?” And, you can ask them some specific questions, like how do you feel about your benefits, or do you feel that you work for a manager who cares about you and supports your growth? You could ask those narrow questions in pulse surveys, and you can get that feedback immediately.

Why are employee engagement strategies not working?

No one’s ever taken it sincerely. Wall Street never took it sincerely. CEOs never took it sincerely. It’s always been a check-the-box activity. You do surveys once or twice a year. By the time the feedback gets out, it’s stale. 

Employees feel that it’s insincere, so they think engagement is a joke. And on top of that, no one’s ever been held accountable for it ever. So, most managers just think, “Oh, this is just an HR activity.” So, if you’ve got a toxic manager, or somebody’s not caring about their people and supporting them and doing the things that we know are highly effective for…[representing] highly effective leaders, then what you end up with is…an act of disrespect.

You’re asking people, “Tell me how we can make things better,” and then you never do anything with the feedback, and people end up really resenting that. So with pulse surveys, you can ask people specifically, “How do you feel?” And, then management can get together and say, “Hey, is this just a rough period right now, or do we need to make some adjustments?” Because the evidence is clear that how people feel at work drives their, no pun intended, their engagement, their commitment, their loyalty, their productivity, and it’s just this enormous win-win for organizations.

When we’ve always focused on engagement, that’s only something that companies cared about. Like, I’m an employee of a company, and they’re like, “We’re trying to elevate engagement.” It’s like, “I don’t care. There’s no win for me in that.” Whereas, if you’re focusing on well-being, you’re going to have people who are thriving, and we know that when people are thriving, organizations thrive at the same time.

Should HR pros avoid using the term employee engagement and focus on terms like well-being, productivity, etc.?

To be fair to some organizations that have really taken this seriously, I’m not criticizing that. I think that’s fine. If you have high engagement in your organization and you’ve committed to it, people validate it. In other words, employees say, “This is a really great place for me to work,” nobody should be changing. I’m not advocating for that.

A lot of times what organizations do is that they blend the four and the five scores. So, for example…on a scale of one to five, how caring and supportive is your manager to you personally? 

Well, there’s a big difference between a four and a five. If you give it a five, it’s like you’ve got a fantastic manager who genuinely cares about you. If you give it a four, you have some hesitation. There’s something missing there. It’s not a perfect score, but what happens is: a lot of cases that managers or companies that are putting these surveys together, they’ll take the fours and the fives and they’ll go, “Wow. 90% of our people are engaged.” That’s not really the case.

We know that well-being is something that’s really important to employees, whereas engagement has never been important to them. There’s no reason for them to be concerned about engagement. So, if you have something that is proven to have a direct correlation to organizational success, i.e. employee well-being, why wouldn’t you just focus on that? It’s simpler, and it’s a win-win for people.

An interview with Mark C. Crowley, author of ‘The Power of Employee Well-Being’

“If you’re focusing on well-being, you’re going to have people who are thriving, and we know that when people are thriving, organizations thrive at the same time.”

Why HR should ditch employee engagement strategies

Telling employees that they matter can feel stuffy.

But it’s become a crucial talent strategy to train leaders and managers on the skills that help employees feel like they matter, according to Zach Mercurio, leadership researcher and author of 

The Power of Mattering: How Leaders Can Create a Culture of Significance

Mercurio chatted with HR Brew about his book and why a mattering strategy 

 last year. What new ideas did you bring into this book?

My first book was about the power of purpose, which is our contribution and knowing our use and usefulness, but it’s very difficult for someone to see their contribution if they don’t first believe they’re worthy of contributing, so I almost see this book, 

This is a book about how do you create an environment where the people around you actually feel worthy of contributing, and making sure that people feel valued, and then know how they add value, that they feel seen, and that they feel heard, and that they feel needed…In psychology, that name of that feeling…is called mattering, and it’s a distinct concept that can only be generated through interpersonal interactions.

There are several things that are happening that all point to a mattering deficit. One of those things is this idea of disengagement. As 

 in January of this year, engagement is at its lowest rate in a decade, and that’s despite millions of dollars being spent on engagement over the last decade….Almost 40% of people in that sample from Gallup indicated they didn’t think anybody at work cared for them as a person.

Another symptom of this mattering deficit is workplace loneliness. Almost eight out of 10 people indicate that they feel 

, but this is, again, despite connecting more...We’re actually communicating more than ever, but we’re still lonely. One of the things that we’re missing is that, when you look at the research on loneliness, it’s not the quantity of interaction that matters, it’s the quality…It’s feeling seen, and heard, valued, and needed, feeling that we matter.

What we’re seeing is not a disengagement crisis, not a loneliness epidemic, it’s really at its core a mattering deficit. People feel insignificant in their daily interactions, and you can’t solve that through more programs, perks, or platforms. You can only solve that through equipping people and leaders with the skills to show the person across from them how they’re significant to them.

What I would encourage HR leaders to do first is actually to do an audit of the skills that leaders are developing and being evaluated on that create the daily experience of feeling valued…For example, to pay attention and see a person, to conduct a meaningful check in, to actually create an environment where people feel that they can speak up, to listen deeply. Are [leaders] evaluated on and prepared to affirm people and show them the difference that they make and spot their strengths and cultivate those strengths?

These skills have been labeled as “soft”…When we see something as soft or simple, we tend to approach it with less rigor. So, if you think in an HR function, the rigor at which you approach compliance to certain policies and procedures, are you approaching the human skills and scaling the human skills so leaders can see, hear, value, and show people how they’re needed with the same rigor as you’re approaching compliance?

An interview Zach Mercurio, author of ‘The Power of Mattering’

Why a mattering strategy matters to HR.

Do I matter? Your manager should make you feel like it

Millennials might’ve been promised a more stable future and workplace than will exist for them.

Gen Xers and Baby Boomers likely remember a time when a one-company tenure was the norm. Gen Z workers shudder at the thought of that. Older generations also know what it’s like to buy a house for a fraction of its current market value, while many younger professionals probably don’t put home ownership on their vision boards anymore. So, where does that leave millennials? Perhaps, stuck somewhere between the promise of what their parents had and the reality that their kids are born into.

This pressure could be causing higher rates of burnout, as 66% of millennials say they feel “moderate” or “high” levels of burnout compared to 60% of Gen Xers, 56% of Gen Zers, and 39% of Baby Boomers, according to a recent 

Millennials are going through “a perfect storm of professional and personal stress,” said Leah Phifer Buck, an employee engagement consultant and founder of consulting firm WhyWork. These employees, those roughly between 29 and 44 years old, are commonly slammed with caregiving responsibilities for kids and/or aging parents while navigating the growing demands of their careers, Buck told HR Brew, which can exacerbate stress and increase their likelihood of burnout.

Millennials might be asking themselves the same question. This generation has gone through multiple economic recessions before even reaching a mid-life crisis. From the dot-com bubble bust in 2001, the Great Recession in 2008, the Covid-19 pandemic, and now the current administration’s foreign tariff policies, millennials could be wrapped into yet another chilling economic downturn.

“We might never achieve the level of economic stability that the Baby Boomer generation, our parents, did, but I think that a lot of millennials are starting to reconcile with that,” Buck said. “As they make peace with the economic reality that they face, they’re starting to lean into, ‘How can I still do what I love? How can I still do things that light me up and find joy in my job?’

Matthew Owenby, chief strategy officer and corporate services executive at Aflac, agrees that millennials have gone through many unstable times, and it could have taken away the workplace they had hoped to be working in. But he told HR Brew that another big contributor to their higher rates of burnout is the lack of work-life balance exhibited by many company executives.

“Leaders need to be aware that they’re controlling the pace of the work for their workforce,” he said. “A lot of this burnout [and] a lot of the experience that employees are having, millennial and otherwise, are directly related to leadership or the lack thereof.”

 As a millennial herself, Buck said there’s a desire among her generation to “improve the system,” which increases pressure to do better and be better workers, leaders, parents, etc. Sometimes millennials “beat our heads against a wall,” she said, trying to help everyone else so much that they’ve burned themselves out. She suggests a solution lies somewhere between companies making structural changes and employees taking on responsibility.

Starting with mental healthcare coverage, Buck noted, it’s important for HR to effectively communicate available benefits and resources for tackling burnout, but it then becomes incumbent on employees to utilize them.

“I work with clients all the time who say, ‘We don’t know why our employees are so stressed or burned out, because we offer this great mental healthcare coverage.’ But then when I dig deeper and I ask them, ‘Well, how are you communicating the coverage to employees?’” Buck said. “That’s often where the disconnect lies. It’s not that the employers aren’t offering these things, it’s that maybe employees don’t know about it or aren’t taking advantage of it.”

Helping millennial employees tackle burnout boils down to basic communications, expectation setting, and leadership modeling work-life balance, Owenby said.

“It’s fun to talk about work-life balance. It’s another thing to achieve it, and then it’s another thing to encourage it, and encourage leaders to encourage that,” he said. “There has to be a higher standard when it comes to educating leaders, and I think there has to be specific programs in place within corporations to deal with the nuances that the millennial generation is experiencing.”

Buck said she has hope that Gen Z and younger generations will be better about avoiding burnout and mitigating its symptoms when they arise.

“While they may not have all the answers, the fact that they’re surfacing these conversations, and a lot of these discussions are being led by millennials and really pushed by Gen Z, I see as a really promising step forward in this discussion,” she said.

Man resting his head on his work desk, stressed and tired