Engagement: A Missing Link in Innovation (and Managers Are Overlooking It)

The recent Wall Street Journal article “Come Back Later” (Aug. 30–31) captured a frustrating reality in today’s corporate environment: the growing difficulty of getting time with your manager. This may seem like a scheduling issue, but it reveals something deeper and more dangerous, a collapse in employee engagement. Engagement is at an all-time low in corporate America. The latest data shows that only 31% of U.S. employees were engaged in 2024, a 10-year low.

When we hear that only 31% of employees are engaged at work, it’s easy to gloss over the number, but it tells a powerful story. It means the remaining 69% are not fully in. They may be logging in, attending meetings, and completing tasks, but they are not bringing their full energy, creativity, or commitment. They are playing it safe. Disengagement is not always visible, it is quiet, compliant, and risk-averse. And that is exactly the opposite of what innovation needs. Because innovation doesn’t come from people doing the minimum, it comes from people who feel safe enough, valued enough, and clear enough to go beyond what is expected.

Engagement: Critical for Innovation

When team members can’t access their leaders, they are left without the clarity, alignment, and support they need to contribute meaningfully. And without engagement, innovation can grind to a halt.

This erosion of manager accessibility is structural. As the WSJ points out, companies have aggressively flattened their organizations over the past few years, removing layers of middle management in the name of agility and cost-cutting. While this may streamline decision-making, it has dramatically increased the number of direct reports per manager, rising from an average of 5 to as many as 15 or more. With fewer support roles and broader spans of control, many managers are simply overwhelmed. The result? They spend more time triaging tasks than developing people, and engagement becomes collateral damage.

The innovation mindset drives engagement

At TicTacToe Innovation, we recognize that engagement isn’t a mystery. It’s built on three foundational elements: clear expectations, the knowledge, and tools to do the job well, and trust between managers and their teams. If a direct report can’t refine or set expectations with their manager, they are forced to guess. That leads to misaligned priorities, wasted effort, and disillusionment, none of which support a culture of experimentation or creative thinking.

The WSJ also points out that in their lack of time, managers are no longer getting to know their direct reports in any personal way. While this may seem like a lighter matter, it’s not. People work for people, not companies. When a manager has no time to develop a personal connection, employee interest, loyalty, and sense of being valued diminishes. Dignity and feeling valued are critical in this equation. When employees don’t feel seen or appreciated, innovation suffers. So let’s be clear: clear expectations, feeling valued, and trust, combined with manager accessibility, are not optional. They are foundational to engagement and creative performance.

This isn’t just theory, it’s measurable. When we partnered with the Mondelez Global R&D team on one of our signature TicTacToe Innovation programs, their engagement scores rose by more than 20 percentage points. Why? Because managers learned to get intentional about the full set of components that drive a mindset of creativity and innovation, one that is fundamentally human-centered.

What do we mean by that? It’s a mindset that starts with employees, even before any product is developed or any service is sold. When employees feel seen as whole person and trusted, they stop playing it safe and start thinking boldly.

Engagement as a metric

Engagement is not a soft metric; it’s the soil from which innovation grows. That’s why engagement matters: not as the goal, but as a signal that the innovation environment is working. Companies spend millions building innovation labs and launching design sprints, while ignoring the single most important factor: whether their people feel empowered to take risks, know their opinions matter, believe they are valued and know what is expected of them.

It’s time for managers to realize that accessibility is not a “nice to have”, it is strategic.

“Come back later” may be the most expensive phrase in the modern workplace. Let’s replace it with: “I’ve got 15 minutes, what do you need?”