The Australian Workforce Paradox
Australia’s workforce presents an interesting paradox.
According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026, only 21% of Australian employees are ‘engaged’ with their work, while 65% are not engaged and 14% are actively disengaged. At the same time, 50% report experiencing stress during much of the previous day, ten percentage points above the global average of 40%.
Yet, Australians are not generally reporting poor life outcomes. Some 55% are classified, in the Gallup report, as thriving in their overall lives, compared with 34% globally. And despite a significant recent decline, 64% still believe it is a good time (in 2026) to find another job.
Taken together, these figures tell a more nuanced story than a simple narrative of workforce dissatisfaction and disengagement.
Australian employees can be doing well in life while experiencing considerable pressure at work. They can feel confident about their employment prospects without feeling strongly engaged with their current workplace. And they can continue to turn up to work, perform their roles and meet expectations without feeling strongly psychologically connected to their work or workplace.
These measures describe different aspects of the employee experience. High stress does not necessarily mean low engagement, just as engagement does not mean an absence of stress. But the combination of high stress and relatively low engagement is worth examining.
Australia’s daily work-related stress rate has risen substantially over the longer term, from around the mid-30% range in 2010 to 50% in 2025.
The picture that emerges in the Gallup report is of a workforce that is comparatively positive about life and confident in its employment prospects, but under considerable pressure and with relatively few employees engaged at work.
That raises an important organisational question: What does it mean for an organisation when most employees continue to work and contribute, but relatively few are genuinely engaged in their work and workplace?
To answer that, we first need to be clear about what employee engagement actually tells us.
What Does Employee Engagement Actually Tell Us?
Employee engagement is a term often used loosely.
It can become shorthand for job satisfaction, workplace morale or whether employees generally feel positive about their employer. However, these concepts are not interchangeable.
Gallup defines employee engagement as the involvement and enthusiasm employees have in their work and workplace. It assesses workplace conditions such as whether employees know what is expected of them, have the resources they need, receive recognition, feel cared about, have opportunities to develop, believe their opinions count and feel connected to the organisation’s purpose.
Engagement, therefore, tells us something about an employee’s psychological connection to their work and workplace: the extent to which they are involved in and enthusiastic about it.
Employees experience their organisation through what it actually does: how managers treat them, whether commitments are honoured, whether decisions are fair, whether their contribution is recognised, whether they have respect, meaningful autonomy and whether it is safe to question, disclose mistakes or raise concerns.
Over time, those experiences can shape trust and what organisational psychology describes as the psychological contract: the unwritten expectations of reciprocity between the employee and the organisation. Research commonly describes the psychological contract as a set of beliefs about reciprocal obligations between employee and employer.
Employees contribute their time and capability, but also something less easily specified in an employment contract: judgement, flexibility, cooperation, discretion, initiative and, potentially, commitment.
In return, they form expectations about fairness, respect, recognition, support, opportunity and whether the organisation will honour the commitments it makes.
Our previous examination of intrinsic motivation described this as a form of quid pro quo.
Where that reciprocal relationship is maintained, trust can strengthen. Where employees perceive that relationship to have been compromised, the consequences can be more subtle than resignation or overt non-compliance. Their sense of ownership may diminish, engagement may weaken and responsibility may increasingly narrow towards only what is formally required.
This is where engagement becomes particularly interesting as an indicator of organisational culture.
What engagement can tell us is something about the quality of an employee’s relationship with their work and workplace, and whether the conditions exist for involvement, enthusiasm and contribution beyond minimum requirements.
Gallup’s description of employees who are not engaged is instructive: they are psychologically unattached to their work and company and contribute time without the same energy or passion.
That distinction, between performing a role and being genuinely engaged in the work and workplace, is where the discussion about organisational culture should begin.
What Shapes Employee Engagement?
Engagement is not simply an individual attitude that employees bring to work. It is shaped by the environment in which they work, and managers are central to that environment.
Many of the conditions Gallup associates with engagement are experienced through an employee’s immediate manager: clarity about what is expected, access to the resources needed to perform, recognition for good work, opportunities to develop, meaningful conversations about progress and a sense that their contribution matters.
This makes managers more than supervisors of performance. They are one of the principal ways employees experience the organisation itself.
Organisational values may be set at the top, but employees encounter them locally: through how decisions are explained, whether expectations are clear, whether good work is recognised, whether workloads and resources allow them to succeed, whether mistakes can be discussed and whether commitments are honoured. All of this comes from their manager.
Gallup’s research has consistently identified managers as a major influence on employee engagement. The quality of management has a substantial influence on how employees experience their workplace.
However, management is not the whole story.
Purpose, recognition, development, autonomy and psychological safety also matter. So does job design itself. Employees are more likely to engage where they understand why their work matters, have reasonable scope to exercise judgement, can develop their capabilities and feel able to raise concerns or challenge decisions without disproportionate consequences.
These conditions reinforce one another. Engagement is better understood not as something organisations ask of employees, but as something organisational conditions help create.
That distinction matters when we turn from individual engagement to organisational culture.
From Employee Engagement to Organisational Culture
Culture is often described in terms of values, behaviours and “the way things are done around here”. But it is also revealed in what employees are prepared to contribute when formal requirements no longer provide the complete answer.
Employees across the engagement spectrum can perform their roles competently, follow procedures and meet expectations. The difference becomes more important in the space beyond minimum compliance.
Organisations routinely depend on workplace behaviours that are difficult to mandate completely: exercising judgement, questioning something that does not look right, sharing knowledge, identifying emerging problems, admitting mistakes, helping colleagues, suggesting improvements and taking responsibility when circumstances fall outside established procedures.
These are discretionary behaviours. Policies can encourage them and managers can expect them, but they cannot be produced by instruction alone.
This is where engagement, trust and culture begin to converge.
Where employees experience fairness, purpose, recognition, autonomy and credible leadership, there is a stronger foundation for ownership and discretionary contribution. They are invested in the success of the organisation that employs them.
Where the relationship becomes predominantly transactional, contribution may increasingly centre on what the role formally requires rather than what the circumstances demand.
The cultural difference can be subtle. It is the difference between “What am I required to do?” and “What needs to be done?”
For organisations concerned with resilience, risk and security, that distinction matters.
Why This Matters for Security
What does any of this have to do with security?
Potentially, quite a lot. However, the relationship between employee and employer needs to be understood carefully.
An organisation can have well-designed policies, sophisticated technology, mandatory training, access controls, monitoring and clearly defined security responsibilities. These provide the essential architecture of security.
Their effectiveness, however, still depends in part on people.
Employees decide whether to question an unusual request, report a mistake, challenge a colleague, escalate a concern, protect sensitive information when working under pressure, or stop and think when following the easiest path would be more convenient.
Some of these behaviours can be mandated. The willingness to exercise judgement, take ownership and act in the organisation’s interests when nobody is directing the response is much harder to prescribe.
Research into insider threat reaches a similar conclusion. Dr Eric Lang, drawing on more than three decades of personnel security research, argues that good policy and technological safeguards are necessary but insufficient. His central proposition is striking: where people possess the knowledge, skills and personally felt commitment to protect their colleagues and organisation, even limited policies can succeed; without that commitment, even extensive policies can fail.
The relationship between engagement and security is more nuanced.
Employees across the engagement spectrum can be conscientious, trustworthy and compliant with security requirements. They can also make mistakes, exercise poor judgement or circumvent controls.
The significance of engagement lies elsewhere: in the organisational conditions that can strengthen ownership, discretionary effort and the willingness to act beyond minimum requirements.
Organisations cannot anticipate every security decision in advance. Policies cannot describe every situation, technology cannot observe every interaction and controls cannot substitute entirely for judgement.
Indeed, Dr Lang’s research emphasises that employees and supervisors are often critical to recognising and reporting concerning behaviour precisely because people can perceive contextual and behavioural signals that technological systems may not.
Psychological safety matters here as well: research cited by Dr Lang found employees who felt more psychologically safe were more likely to report unethical behaviour they observed.
Conclusion
This brings us back to Australia’s worker engagement figures published by Gallup.
They provide a window into the relationship Australians currently have with their work and workplaces. Only 21% are engaged, while 79% are either not engaged or actively disengaged. Put another way, only around one in five Australian employees is experiencing the level of involvement and enthusiasm that Gallup associates with engagement.
For organisations, the significance lies in what helps move people beyond minimum contribution towards greater ownership, commitment and discretionary effort.
We can mandate policies. We can implement controls. We can monitor compliance.
However, we cannot mandate care.
For Boards and executives, the question is therefore not only whether the organisation has the right policies and controls, but whether it has created the conditions in which people are willing to exercise judgement, speak up, take ownership and act in the organisation’s interests when circumstances demand more than compliance.
That is not simply an employee engagement issue. It is an organisational resilience and security issue. It can be a national security issue.
In the next article in this series, we will examine the relationship between employee engagement, security culture and insider risk, including how changes in engagement, trust and the psychological contract may affect behaviour, what they can and cannot tell us about insider risk, and what this means for a proportionate trusted-workforce approach.