There’s an elephant in the room that few HR teams or business leaders are willing to acknowledge. HR Directors avoid raising it for fear of pushback or producing an even bigger elephant, and the C-suite often blissfully ignores the elephant’s size and importance – or shifts attention away from their own part in it.
That elephant is misalignment or ‘not seeing eye-to-eye’. When it’s present between HR and leadership, employee engagement and wellbeing take a sharp downturn. So how does this misalignment show up, and why does it have such a serious impact on engagement and wellbeing?
WorkBuzz’s 2026 Future of Work Report reveals that employee engagement is stagnating across U.K. organisations. 58% of organisations reported an improvement in employee engagement levels in 2024, but this figure dropped to just 33% in 2025.
Wellbeing figures aren’t any better, and despite employee wellbeing being HR leaders’ top priority for the last two years, 68% of HR professionals report that wellbeing has either stayed the same or declined over the past 12 months.
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While engagement and wellbeing are complex, with a range of external and internal factors accounting for fluctuations in these themes between one organisation and the next, one finding is clear – The misalignment between HR and leadership teams is driving higher levels of employee disengagement and burnout.
What does misalignment look like?
While employees won’t necessarily know that their HR and executive teams aren’t on the same page, there will be clear signs which will impact every facet of the organisation. Company-wide communication will be erratic and lacking clarity; there will be contradictions between what is communicated, leaders’ behaviours and what is done; and the workplace culture will be poor, lacking purpose, goals and unity.
Behind the scenes, there will be trust issues between HR and leadership, with conflicting opinions on strategy, and weak communication.
WorkBuzz’s research starkly demonstrates the damaging impacts of misalignment: When HR has lost confidence in leadership, just 37% of HR practitioners feel aligned to the leadership team, compared to 89% when confidence in leadership exists.
The business impacts of conflict
It should be no surprise that when HR and the leadership team hold conflicting perspectives and struggle to find common ground, there’s a cascading effect across the business which impacts employee engagement and wellbeing.
When misalignment exists, HR is less able to influence the decisions that shape the employee experience, and the result is a workplace culture that becomes fragmented and poorly understood. All this feeds into employee engagement and employee wellbeing.
The research shows that in organisations where there is HR and leadership misalignment, just 9% of these businesses have seen an improvement in engagement over the past 12 months and almost 50% report a decline. Contrast this to when there is alignment, with 35% of organisations reporting improvements in engagement levels.
Similarly, wellbeing has improved in just 3% of companies that exhibit misalignment compared to in 28% of businesses that have aligned HR and leadership teams.
Creating unity from the top down
Clearly, HR wants to be strongly aligned to the C-Suite rather than at odds with them, and while improvements won’t happen overnight, there are a few key actions that will help to achieve this.
Building a strong culture in partnership with leadership
To start, HR must work in partnership – and build relationships – with leaders to architect and nurture the desired workplace culture. After all, a culture is only as strong as how it’s understood and role-modelled by everyone, every single day. It’s all very well having company values, but if leaders don’t role-model behaviours in line with these values, they’re worthless. Plus, the respect and trust of the leaders will be lost. Therefore, the ‘aspirational’ company culture must be defined and the desired behaviours understood and communicated. Any behaviours which don’t fit the company’s values must always be called out – even to the most senior leaders in an organisation.
Dialling up communication
Not all leaders are natural communicators, but it’s a skill that leaders must nurture to ensure everyone understands the company’s strategy, goals and purpose. With clear communication comes greater confidence in what needs doing and how, giving HR the assurance to lead on the people strategy. HR should therefore work with leaders, marketing and internal communications, to create a robust employee communications strategy that delivers quality two-way dialogue between leaders and the wider workforce.
Alignment through smart insights
Trust between HR and leadership grows when both sides align on the core elements of the people strategy and the actions needed to drive improvement. That alignment is only possible when everyone is working from a single source of truth – robust, reliable insights that HR and the C-suite can confidently use to make decisions.
AI has a valuable role to play here, such as by delivering clear data-backed insights into how employees are feeling and what can be done to improve engagement, wellbeing and culture. The most advanced engagement tech can even analyse employees’ open-ended comments in engagement surveys, uncover the key themes, and transform them into clear and shareable human stories for HR, executives and managers to act on, finally providing the “why” behind employee feedback.
A final word
Addressing the elephant in the room isn’t just a necessary step, it’s the gateway to unlocking a healthier, more engaged workforce. When HR and leadership move in unison, supported by clear communication, shared insights, and a unified culture, organisations create the conditions where people, and performance, can truly thrive.
Melisaan Foster is Chief Experience Officer at employee engagement specialist, WorkBuzz, where she helps businesses build great company cultures by gaining feedback from their people. Melisaan was awarded a Mark of Excellence - Outstanding Young Communicator by the CIPR in 2018, named an Inspiring Leader in 2020, and Customer Success Rising Star EMEA in 2022.
