5 Changes HR Should Expect in Employee Engagement in 2027

Employees are asking new questions about their work. Which parts of my job will AI take over? Where does my career go from here? Can I trust what leadership is telling me?

How organizations answer those questions will shape employee engagement in 2027. AIHR's HR Trends 2027 report highlights three important shifts with a direct impact on engagement: AI becoming part of everyday work, changing career paths, and the growing importance of trust and human capability.

All of these changes ask a lot of employees: new tools, new skills, and new ways of working, often without a clear sense of where it all leads. Whether people take that on depends heavily on how engaged they are. Gallup's research finds that organizations with engaged employees tend to navigate disruption more successfully.

For HR, that means engagement itself is changing: what drives it, how it shows up, and how to measure it. Here's what to expect in 2027.

The changing role of employee engagement

Whether your organization is prepared for it or not, the relationship between employee engagement and business performance is changing. HR teams have long seen engagement as a driver of productivity. That still holds. But as work changes, the reality is becoming much more complicated.

• High productivity can coexist with low engagement: Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 report found that global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, which was its lowest level since 2020. In contrast, U.S. labor productivity increased by 2.2% year-over-year in Quarter 2 in 2026, and output rose by 2.5%. While the two figures come from different data sets, together they suggest that output alone can't tell HR how employees experience their work.
• Engagement is becoming a signal of adaptability: Roles and workflows are dramatically changing, and organizations need employees who are willing to learn new skills, embrace AI tools, adjust their current ways of working, and contribute to change rather than simply maintaining their current output. For these reasons, employee engagement remains extremely important, and should be a priority for HR teams, managers, and leaders.
• The behaviors organizations need are changing: As AI tools grow in sophistication and take on a larger share of routine and repetitive tasks, attributes including judgement, knowledge sharing, voicing concerns, collaboration, and problem-solving are becoming increasingly valuable. These are discretionary behaviors. People offer them when they feel engaged and hold them back when they don't. Productivity metrics rarely capture them, which makes engagement data an important signal of whether they're happening.
  
• Strong performance today can mask longer-term risks: An employee may keep meeting targets while growing uncertain about their future with the organization, for example because AI is changing their role or the next career step is unclear. That uncertainty can make them less willing to invest in new skills or less committed to staying. Engagement data can pick up those shifts long before it shows in productivity and performance.

Employee engagement is taking on a broader role. Instead of HR primarily viewing employee engagement as a lever for productivity, teams can use this metric to understand how willing and prepared employees are to adapt, contribute their expertise, and remain invested in their role and the wider business as their work shifts.

Dr. Dieter Veldsman, Chief HR Scientist, sees engagement as a forward-looking measure: "Productivity data shows what people deliver today. Engagement data shows whether they're ready for what their work is becoming."

Employee engagement shifts to pay attention to in 2027

Here are the key changes that HR teams must pay attention to in 2027, and how they will affect employee engagement.

1. AI will become part of the everyday employee experience

According to McKinsey’s research, AI technology has the potential to automate over half of current U.S. work hours. As AI becomes embedded in regular workflows, it will change how employees experience their jobs on a day-to-day basis. The concern is that this use of and reliance on AI can affect employees’ confidence, sense of autonomy, and workload, and lead to confusion around what employees are expected to do themselves versus handover to AI.

AI also adds a new kind of work. Employees now need to review, check, and correct what AI produces, and that effort is easy to overlook. Workday's research found that nearly 40% of reported AI time savings are lost to checking and correcting AI outputs. When that work goes unrecognized, employees can end up feeling busier, with little to show for the time AI was supposed to save.

Confidence is part of the picture too, and it often lags behind enthusiasm. AIHR research across 334 HR teams found that 65% report strong AI buy-in and advocacy, yet only 35% feel confident in their AI skills and development opportunities. If the function guiding this change feels underprepared, employees elsewhere may feel the same.

That's why HR needs to understand whether employees feel equipped to work with AI, and whether AI tools are making their work easier or more complicated across different use cases.

2. Organizational trust will depend more on how work is designed and decisions are made

Employees increasingly experience organizational decisions through AI and data-driven systems. These systems influence how work is assigned, how performance is monitored and evaluated, and how people are rewarded, which can make trust harder to build. They may not see what data is collected, how it's used, or how a system reaches an outcome.

In that environment, trust depends on transparency, consistency, fairness, and clear human oversight of what the technology decides. Employees also need to feel safe enough to question an outcome that doesn't look right, and HR needs to hear it when they do.

For Erik van Vulpen, Co-Founder and Dean of AIHR, trust comes down to three questions employees ask: "What data does the system use? Who's accountable when it gets something wrong? And can I challenge the outcome? If those questions don't have clear answers, the system won't earn their trust."

Earning that trust starts with listening. Pulse surveys and regular check-ins show HR how much confidence employees have in new systems and how fairly they believe change is being introduced.

3. Career development will need to become more intentional

Routine and entry-level work has traditionally served as a training ground for employees to build the knowledge, context, judgement and practical experience needed to take on more advanced work. As AI takes over more of that work, those development pathways start to narrow, and organizations risk losing the experiences that prepare people for more complex responsibilities.

AIHR’s labor market analysis has found that demand for more administrative and service-based work is under pressure also within HR itself. Over six months, demand fell 38.3% for HR Service Desk Agents and 29.6% for HR Administrators. More specialized roles moved the other way, with demand up 65.4% for Organizational Effectiveness Specialists and 21.6% for Change Management Specialists.

For employees, this can feel like a squeeze. Expectations to build advanced skills keep rising, while the obvious ways to do so disappear. That can erode trust, commitment, and the willingness to put in discretionary effort. HR teams need to be purposeful about building development back into roles, through mentoring, guided practice, stretch assignments, and earlier exposure to complex work.

4. Employees will need greater clarity on how they create value

As AI handles more routine tasks, capabilities like judgement, business understanding, problem-solving, and specialist expertise will grow in importance. However, these capabilities, which organizations increasingly need, are transforming faster than employees are equipped to build them. AIHR’s analysis shows that 33% of the skills in the average job changed over the space of just four years. HR is feeling the same pressure. Separate AIHR research found gaps in competencies like digital agility, data literacy, and business acumen across HR teams.

The consequence of this for employee engagement is that if employees are expected to contribute in new ways at work without sufficient clarity or opportunities to develop, they may feel less confident in their role and future contribution in the organization. Therefore, HR and managers must make changing expectations explicit in real time and support employees in building the capabilities they require now and in the near future.

5. Knowledge sharing will become a bigger part of the engagement agenda

AI tools draw on what an organization has documented, such as its policies, data, and records. Much of what makes experienced employees valuable never makes it into those systems: the context, judgment, and know-how they've built over years. When those employees leave, that knowledge leaves with them, and an external hire rarely brings it back.

Capturing that knowledge is becoming a priority for many organizations. But employees can't be made to share what they know. They must have good reasons to contribute the knowledge, insight, and nuance they have spent years gathering. Once an employee leaves the business, their institutional knowledge leaves with them, and organizations may struggle to replace their capabilities and accumulated context via an external hire.

If organizations want employees to contribute what they know, help others learn, and invest in collective capability, then the workplace culture has to support this. For example, does your current culture around recognition, trust, workload, and ways of working encourage people to share expertise, or does it leave expertise siloed with individual employees?

For HR, that makes knowledge sharing an engagement question. People need a good reason to share what they know, and that starts with trusting it won't be used against them.

A final word

As organizations move into an AI-led future, measuring true employee engagement will need to go beyond satisfaction and productivity. AI is changing how people work, while career pathways, skills, trust, and knowledge sharing are also evolving. HR teams and managers must understand whether employees feel equipped and supported to adapt to these changes.

The secret? Building employee engagement into how work is designed. Organizations that provide clear expectations, meaningful development opportunities, trust, and support will be better positioned to keep employees engaged as the world of work continues to transform. By listening to employees and being proactive in addressing changing needs, HR can help create an engaged, thriving workforce that is prepared for the future.

As employee expectations continue to evolve, regular listening will be essential to understanding how these changes affect people at work. Platforms like CultureMonkey help organizations capture employee perspectives through anonymous engagement and pulse surveys, identify emerging concerns around trust, career development, and workplace changes, and turn feedback into meaningful action. This gives HR teams a clearer picture of what employees need to stay engaged, supported, and confident about their future at work.