Only 22% of employees across Australia and New Zealand are actively engaged. What can be done?

Written by Reo Group | Aug 8, 2025 1:02:22 AM

65% of employees surveyed across Australia & New Zealand for the 2025 Gallup State of the Global Workplace Report are ‘not engaged’ at work.

This is defined as 'just showing up', without energy and passion. They are detached from their job, their boss, their company.

12% are ‘actively disengaged’, which is where they start to display cynicism, resentment and overall negativity.

So, if 78% are either ‘not engaged’ or ‘actively disengaged’ we have a problem.

But if we think about the world we currently live in, are we surprised? It’s not just poor leadership or company culture creating these feelings, it’s the onslaught of every day life and its stresses, the cost of living, and world events taking its toll, and it looks different for every individual.

People are the growth engine of any organisation. When they are not engaged productivity takes a hit, not just because they might not be fulfilling potential in terms of output, but because they are also not innovating.

When you’re not innovating you are not adding value and therefore you don’t feel valued, so engagement remains low.

Getting out of this cycle is critical. There is a mental wellness crisis in the modern workplace. It is impacting physical health, incidence of burnout, absenteeism, productivity, and the future of organisations.

Are we doing enough to support our people? Providing our teams with the tools to manage their inner world - the stories they tell themselves, their negative self-talk, their imposter syndrome, their people pleasing tendencies, their fear of failure and conflict?

By delivering coping mechanisms to management, we can filter these tools down through an organisation and, over time and with persistence, make real impact. Not just on our company performance, but in people’s actual lives and overall happiness.

It won’t change the difficult times we are in. But it will change our ability to manage ourselves through them, and when you make that change in your inner world, it starts to become reflected in the world around you.

At the core of Reo Group sits a culture that has been shaped around self mastery. We assess our team, not on sales figures, but on how they display key behaviours in their day-to-day. We start our week with gratitude and learnings in a company-wide meeting. We teach our team to master themselves, to adopt the tools to have critical conversations with confidence, to build awareness of their own emotions and to seek to listen, understand and empathise with others.

This enables our organisation to filter this down to our candidates and the clients we partner with. It is our point of difference and is becoming an ever-bigger part of our identity.

Why? Well, a large proportion of the world economic forum top ten skills of the future are self mastery or self management skills. They are in high demand in the job market and increasingly feature on the core competency lists for roles we are working on in both our recruitment and executive search businesses. We need to know how to identify these skills in others, we need to know how to help candidates develop them in order to be competitive in today’s job market.

If you or your team are looking to get started with learning these skills, we have a introductory guide that we share with our network. You can also assess your self mastery baseline with our quick quiz.