America's engagement crisis isn't a mindset problem. It's an infrastructure problem.

America has had the world's attention this month. The FIFA World Cup final wrapped up on home turf at MetLife Stadium. The country marked 250 years of independence. And Digital Communications at Work goes on sale in the US today, landing in the middle of all of it — which wasn't planned, but might as well have been.

Because behind the flags and the fireworks, American workplaces tell a rather different story. And suddenly "communicate more authentically" starts to sound like the kind of advice you give when you've mistaken the symptom for the disease.

The numbers are worse than the pep talks suggest

Gallup's newest data puts US employee engagement at 31% — the lowest in a decade, level with 2014.

The detail that matters even more than the headline number: managers are just as disengaged as everyone else. Also 31%.

When the people responsible for engaging others are exactly as disengaged as the people they're meant to be engaging, the problem isn't a handful of bad managers. It's the communications infrastructure they're all trying to work around.

Then there's role clarity. Gallup found that just 46% of US workers can clearly say what's expected of them at work, down from 56% in 2020.

People haven't collectively decided to stop caring about their jobs. Work changed. The ways information used to spread — through proximity, routine and repetition — broke apart. Most organisations never rebuilt them.

Work got lonelier, and a town hall won't fix that

Fifty-two per cent of US workers report feeling lonely at work, according to Cigna's 2025 Loneliness in America survey — attached to a genuinely eye-watering number: an estimated $154 billion a year in absenteeism costs alone.

The same research points towards what actually shifts this. Workers who aren't lonely are more likely to say they're willing to work harder than those who are (74% versus 63%). And among lonely workers, the ones who feel understood by their manager report meaningfully higher vitality than those who don't.

We still talk about connection as though it's the fluffy bit that happens after the important work. But the data keeps insisting the opposite.

Most organisations respond to loneliness the only way they know how: by broadcasting a bit harder. Another town hall. Another CEO video. Another email assuring everyone they've been heard.

That's a perfectly sensible response if the problem is lack of information.

However, it is not. Quite the opposite. And it falls apart the moment the problem is lack of human connection.

What actually helps is designing channels — communities, peer spaces and the informal infrastructure most comms strategies treat as decoration — that let people connect with each other while they're getting work done, not just receive messages from above.

Most of the US workforce doesn't have a desk

An assumption baked into too many internal communications strategies: everyone is sitting somewhere with a laptop open, or easy access to a smartphone, checking email throughout the day.

It's wrong for the majority of American workers.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 55.7% of the US workforce — more than 80 million people — are paid by the hour. No desk. No laptop. Often no corporate inbox open all day because, for many of them, there's no inbox at all.

These aren't edge cases. They're retail associates, healthcare workers, warehouse teams, manufacturing shifts and hospitality staff — the people closest to customers, patients and the products organisations actually exist to deliver.

Many organisations still treat them as an exception because their communications strategy was designed around the people sitting nearest Head Office.

And yet a US survey of 1,000 deskless workers found that 54% have limited access to company email, while 69% of employers still rely on email as their primary communication channel. Nearly a quarter say they feel disconnected from their organisation's culture as a direct result.

The maths here is almost offensively simple. If most of your workforce can't reliably access email, email cannot be your primary communications strategy.

That's not an opinion: it’s arithmetic.

What actually closes these gaps

None of this gets fixed with a better slogan or a punchier subject line.

Chapter 1 of Digital Communications at Work opens with a simple discipline: start with what people need, not what you already have.

Applied here, that means asking a blunt question most communications strategies never ask: does our primary channel actually reach the majority of the people we're trying to reach?

For the 55.7% of the US workforce paid by the hour, the honest answer for a lot of organisations is no.

You don't need a six-figure research programme to discover that. Spend an hour shadowing a frontline team. Watch where information actually comes from. It usually isn't the intranet. It's another person.

That's not a communications failure. It's your actual communications network. Your strategy should probably acknowledge it.

That's why we argue for treating communication as an ecosystem with five jobs — Plan, Collaborate, Publish, Distribute and Discuss.

Most organisations obsess over Publish.

The engagement gap usually lives somewhere else.

An organisation that's majority hourly, deskless and often without a company email address needs a Distribute layer built for mobile-first, push-based and manager-mediated communication — not one more email newsletter nobody will read.

Five statistics. One underlying problem.

None of these numbers — 31%, 46%, 52%, 55.7%, 54% — suggest American workers have stopped caring.

They suggest organisations are still communicating as though it's 2008.

A workforce that's desk-based. Permanently logged in. Reading email all day. Sitting within earshot of a manager.

That workplace still exists. It just isn't the majority anymore.

Which means engagement isn't primarily a messaging problem. It's a channel design problem.

That's why Jonathan and I wrote Digital Communications at Work. Not because the world needed another book about writing better CEO emails (it really does not), but because it needed one about designing communication systems that actually fit the way people work now.

That's the case for reading it this week in the US. Not because these problems are uniquely American — plenty of countries could produce a version of this list — but because they're this acute, right now, in the world’s leading economy.

The book’s out today (July 28) in the USA, available via your favourite physical or digital bookstore.