Employee engagement is difficult to define, but most everyone agrees they want engaged employees. It’s not difficult to understand that engaged employees are more productive and less susceptible to turnover, but despite management’s best efforts, engagement rates continue to decline on all key metrics. These are trends managers could easily reverse, instead of throwing their hands up, exclaiming engagement is impossible to nail down. The first is a lack of employee recognition. According to TINYpulse’s 2017 Employee Engagement Report, the number of employees who feel strongly valued at work fell from 31 to 16 percent. The fact that fewer than one in four employees feels valued is telling, and a sad commentary on the state of management. Lack of transparency is another element that can kill morale quickly. The study showed that the number of employees who believe their management team is transparent is only 25 percent. This means that the majority of employees have a distrustful workplace environment where the motivation for improvement will naturally lag.