Maintaining team engagement in 2026 starts with the quality of frontline management
According to Gallup, 70% of how engaged a team is comes down to their manager. In Switzerland, where only 36% of recruiters consider employee retention easy (Michael Page Talent Trends 2025), training and equipping managers has become the single most decisive HR lever available.
Swiss companies are investing in tools, workspace design, and employee perks, and yet their teams’ engagement levels keep falling. This well-documented paradox points to an uncomfortable conclusion: it is not the environment that keeps people. It is their manager.
Why is engagement declining in 2026?
Engagement does not disappear overnight. In fact, it erodes slowly. A meeting without feedback, a decision that goes unexplained, an anxiety that is never named. In 2026, three overlapping dynamics are reinforcing one another.
1. The technological shift
The arrival of generative AI across industries is generating a vague but widespread anxiety that few managers know how to name, let alone address. In Switzerland, 55% of employees already use generative AI tools on a regular basis (Michael Page, 2025), but most do so without any structured training. Employees do not know what AI will change in their roles. And their managers, often just as uncertain, remain silent. That silence is costly.
2. The hybrid work model
Hybrid work has blurred the boundary between professional and personal life. 69% of employees in Switzerland have a hybrid arrangement . That’s 17 percentage points above the European average (Michael Page Talent Trends 2025). On one hand this model delivers real flexibility, but it also amplifies overload and erodes the collective sense of work when management does not adapt accordingly.
3. The generational shift
Millennial and Gen Z employees are not simply looking for a competitive salary. They want to understand where the organisation is going, what is expected of them, and how they will be able to grow. According to the Swiss Association of Commercial Employees (SEC), managerial, interpersonal, and social skills are growing in importance while the need for traditional hierarchical frameworks is declining — a shift that demands a style of management most leaders were never formally taught.
“Employees are asking themselves how their roles will be transformed. But it is difficult, as a manager, to give them a clear directive. They have not yet touched the new reality that awaits them.”
— Carlos Fontelas De Carvalho, President of ADP France, Courrier Cadres, 2025
Who is taking care of manager engagement?
If managers are the primary driver of team engagement, who is looking after managers themselves? Yet, their engagement rate dropped from 30% to 27% in a single year, according to Gallup. Yet no well-being initiative can compensate for a manager who has checked out.
Across Europe, only 13% of employees report being engaged. In Switzerland, this pressure is compounded by an additional reality: according to the Swiss Skills Shortage Index 2025 by Adecco (carried out with the Institute of Sociology at the University of Zurich), the pool of available talent is growing, yet the cost of losing people to disengagement keeps rising.
What does an engaging manager do differently?
The managers who sustain team engagement are not necessarily charismatic. They do not deliver great speeches. What sets them apart is the quality of their presence. A presence rooted in specific, learnable behaviours, not in innate talent. This is precisely what makes it accessible: it can be learned, practised, and also lost if not maintained.
Make work meaningful – consistently
They explain why their team’s work matters, for whom, and in what context. When managers connect the day-to-day work to something larger than a dashboard, it is not empty rhetoric. It is a form of attention that most employees have never truly received, and whose absence they only notice once it is gone.
Practice real feedback
Not the annual review that arrives too late to change anything, but specific, bidirectional, and regular feedback. According to the O.C. Tanner 2024 Global Culture Survey, organisations that actively solicit, use, and acknowledge employee feedback see retention rates jump by over 300% compared to those that don’t.
Build psychological safety
Amy Edmondson, at Harvard Business School, formalised this now well-established concept. A team where people can speak up without fear of judgment engages, innovates, and stays. A team where mistakes are silently punished does not.
Adapt their style
There is no universal management style. What motivates an experienced professional is rarely what drives someone just starting out. The most effective managers know this and adjust accordingly.
Practical approaches that reignite engagement
A word of caution first: there is no magic formula. What works is simple practices, consistently maintained.
- Regular one-on-one meetings. Thirty minutes, every two weeks. Not to review deliverables, but to listen, unblock, and ask: “What is slowing you down right now?” It is such simple question, yet surprisingly rarely asked.
- Specific recognition. Not “good job” : a phrase that no longer means anything, but: “Your Tuesday presentation helped the team visualise the problem differently. That was genuinely useful.” Precision transforms recognition into a meaningful signal.
- Delegation with real autonomy. Assigning genuine responsibility, not disguised micro-management. Deci and Ryan identified autonomy as one of three pillar of intrinsic motivation, alongside competence and belonging. When all three are present, engagement follows naturally.
- Ritualising collective wins. Opening each team meeting with a round of achievements, however small, anchors the group in a positive dynamic rather than a list of problems to solve.
- Training as a signal. Offering training to an employee communicates that they have a future in the organisation. It is one of the most underestimated retention levers available. Yet according to Travail.Suisse (FR), 45.4% of Swiss workers receive little to no encouragement from their employer to pursue continuing education, as stated by the Swiss Federal Statistical Office (FSO).
CHF 4 billion is invested in continuing education in Switzerland every year — yet 45.4% of Swiss workers say they receive insufficient encouragement to train.
→ Source: FSO / Travail.Suisse, 2024
How to train managers in engagement
Training managers to drive engagement works through short, action-oriented programmes that tackle real management situations, not full-day sessions of abstract theory.
The most requested management training topics in 2026 : emotional intelligence, constructive feedback, and change management, reflect a workforce under pressure from constant change. According to MTD Training’s Leadership Trends 2026, emotional intelligence has shifted from a soft skill to “a survival skill” for managers. To this list, Swiss companies add a fourth: hybrid team leadership
A conversation comes up repeatedly in Swiss HR forums. It goes something like this: “We know our managers need training. But we don’t have the time. Or the budget. Or the right tools.”
This trio : time, budget, tools, is real.
But it sometimes masks a more fundamental question: Do we actually believe that management is a skill that can be learned?
The answer, unambiguously, is yes. Indeed, active listening, feedback, change leadership, emotional intelligence. These capabilities can be developed. And they fade if they are not maintained. The Swiss Association of Commercial Employees underscores this in its work on future skills: “The key to employability lies in lifelong learning.” This principle applies as much to managers as to their teams.
What HR leaders across Switzerland are signalling in 2026 is a clear expectation of training providers: short programmes, applicable on Monday morning, grounded in real-world situations. According to the Swiss Skills Shortage Index 2025 by Adecco (in partnership with the University of Zurich), the HR priority is now to “focus training on clear objectives and measurable impact.” In short: not volume. Relevance.
The other dimension not to underestimate: the intergenerational challenge. The wave of baby-boomer retirements is opening up management roles faster than organisations can fill them. Many of today’s most experienced individual contributors will be expected to lead teams within the next few years, without ever having been trained to do so.
The question is no longer whether management training is useful. It is whether organisations can still afford not to invest in it.
“The key to employability lies in lifelong learning. Companies have every interest in investing in the employability of their employees.”
— Swiss Association of Commercial Employees, Future Skills 2025
Are your managers equipped to sustain team engagement in this environment? SwissNova offers management and leadership training designed for the realities of Swiss companies, with a strong presence in Cantons of Geneva, Vaud, and across Suisse Romande.
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