Imagine a business that’s just become employee owned. The trustees are in place, the announcements made, with a leadership team that’s proud of what they’ve built. One year in, they run an engagement survey and the scores look reasonable. While nothing looks alarming, there’s nothing to celebrate either.
The behaviour they’d hoped to see, people speaking up, taking initiative, thinking beyond their own patch, hasn’t materialised. Decisions still travel the same familiar routes. People still escalate problems rather than solving them on the spot.
Leadership teams in this position often reach for the same explanation: people must not be engaged enough. So, they invest in another survey, another town hall, another round of communication. But that response rests on an important assumption, which may be the very reason so little shifts.
Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 report puts UK employee engagement at just 10%, against a global average of 20%. That places the UK among the lowest-performing countries in the developed world on this measure. The same research estimates that poor engagement costs the UK economy in the region of £257 billion a year in lost productivity, a figure that reflects disengaged people doing less than they’re capable of, day after day, across almost every sector.
Numbers on that scale are sobering, but they can also be misleading. The instinct is to treat engagement as a single dial that needs turning up. If you run better surveys, communicate more, launch a wellbeing initiative, the dial should move. In practice though, that rarely works, because engagement isn’t the whole story. Trying to fix it in isolation doesn’t work.
Motivation is what happens inside a person. It’s the individual drive to act, shaped by what matters to that particular human being. One person is motivated by financial security, another by autonomy, another by the chance to learn something new, another by simply being asked their opinion. Herzberg’s research from the 1960s still holds up well here. He found that increasing someone’s pay tends to reduce dissatisfaction, but it doesn’t reliably increase satisfaction. Pay is what he called a hygiene factor: it stops people feeling short-changed, without necessarily making them care. That’s a hugely important distinction, because a great many engagement strategies are still built almost entirely around pay and reward, as though motivation were the same for everyone.
Engagement is different again. If motivation is an engine, engagement is the gearbox. It’s what connects an individual’s internal drive to the actual work in front of them, the organisation’s purpose, and to the people around them. Engagement depends heavily on the conditions a manager and an organisation create: clarity of purpose, trust, fair treatment, and a genuine sense that a person’s contribution counts for something.
The third stage is a behaviour rather than a feeling: ownership. It’s what you see when a person takes responsibility for something that isn’t technically their job, challenges a decision because they care about the outcome, or works through a problem with a colleague rather than escalating it.
You can have a well-motivated, genuinely engaged team who still, when something goes wrong, wait for instructions. Motivation and engagement create the conditions for ownership, but they don’t guarantee it.
None of this is specific to employee ownership. Every organisation, whatever its legal structure, tries to move people along the same journey, from personal motivation, through organisational engagement, to something that looks like genuine ownership behaviour.
What changes in an employee-owned business is the stakes. The whole model depends on people reaching that third stage, and reaching it isn’t even the real destination. Ownership behaviour is the mechanism. The prize it’s meant to unlock is the performance advantage employee ownership promises: better decisions made closer to the point of impact, problems solved rather than escalated, and effort that goes well beyond the bare minimum. An EOT can transfer legal ownership overnight, but it can’t, on its own, produce any of those behaviours. If the journey stalls at engagement, and for many organisations the Gallup figures suggest it does, an employee-owned business ends up structurally different from its competitors without being behaviourally, or commercially, different from them. That’s an expensive gap to leave unaddressed, given everything that goes into making the transition to employee ownership in the first place.
What most engagement strategies miss entirely is that anonymous surveys and national statistics are useful for spotting a trend, but they average away the thing that actually determines whether someone moves from motivation to engagement. Two people doing identical jobs, on identical pay, can have almost nothing in common in terms of what would genuinely engage them.
Dr Dan Harrison’s Engagement and Employment Expectations approach illustrates this well. Instead of asking everyone the same handful of survey questions and averaging the results, it looks at eight categories: development, appreciation, remuneration, communication, authority, personal support, social connection, and work-life balance, and measures how important each one is to a specific individual. For whichever of those turn out to matter most to them, it then shows how well that expectation is currently being met. You can see the gaps that need attention, rather than guessing at them.
Harrison’s own published example, for “Andrew Jones”, shows exactly how much this varies from person to person. Look at just the authority section of his profile, and the same pattern shows up twice. Andrew rates his desire for independence from authority at 9.6 out of 10, and his desire to take a leadership role at 9.2, yet believes only 40% and 30% of those needs respectively are currently being met.
That’s a gap a generic survey would never surface, and it has nothing to do with pay, which he rates as only moderately important. It’s about wanting the room to take initiative and lead, rather than working within someone else’s structure. Someone else’s report might show almost a mirror image: pay and stability mattering enormously, autonomy and leadership barely registering. Neither profile is wrong. They’re simply different people, and no single lever, whether that’s a profit share scheme, a wellbeing app, or a pay review, is going to engage them both equally.
If engagement really is this individual, then the sensible starting point isn’t another organisation-wide survey. Instead, it’s understanding your own profile, and what it would actually take to move you further along that journey yourself.
We can offer you your own Engagement and Employment Expectations report, built on the same Harrison methodology as Andrew Jones’s example above, along with a short 30-minute call to talk through what it shows. The bundle costs £47 plus VAT. It won’t tell you anything about your organisation’s culture as a whole. It will tell you a great deal about what genuinely drives you. Usually, that’s the more useful place to begin.
Download Andrew Jones’s full sample report, and find out how to get your own.
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