Monday.com's Guide to Fixing Low Employee Morale Covers Communication, Managers, Support

Global employee engagement fell to 21% in 2024, matching its pandemic-era low, and the productivity drain behind that figure runs to $438 billion annually. For engineering and product managers at a fast-moving SaaS company navigating AI-driven reorganizations, that is not an abstract HR statistic. It is the cost of skipped 1:1s, unresolved hybrid friction, and a sprint cycle where the same rework keeps appearing in retrospectives.

Monday.com's own workplace guidance identifies three areas where manager behavior moves the needle most sharply: transparent communication, structured manager enablement, and practical, sustained support. What follows is a working playbook, not a values statement. Every tactic here is implementable this week.

Why this moment demands a different playbook

The 2026 operating environment has added a specific stressor that traditional retention frameworks don't fully address: AI-driven workload reshuffling. Disengaged workers who feel their employer doesn't deserve their energy accounted for 27% of the workforce in 2024 and are projected to climb to 28% in 2026, partly because employees watch colleagues managed out for efficiency gains while their own organizations invest minimally in retraining. Organizations aren't investing in training: only 23% of AI decision-makers say they are doing so meaningfully, according to Forrester research.

At monday.com, the product reality accelerates this tension. At its 2025 Elevate conference, the company introduced its new agent builder, monday agents, alongside three new AI capabilities: monday magic, monday vibe, and monday sidekick. Teams that sell, build, and support those tools internally are subject to the same AI-adjacency anxiety the tools are designed to resolve for customers. When team members don't understand how their role evolves alongside the product, morale erodes faster than any compensation adjustment can repair.

McKinsey research estimates that employee disengagement and attrition cost a median-size S&P 500 company between $228 million and $355 million a year in lost productivity, compounding to at least $1.1 billion in lost value over five years. For managers who think in sprint velocity, defect rates, and deal cycle times, low morale is not a soft problem. It is a delivery risk with a dollar sign.

Transparent communication: the structural fix

Monday.com's guidance centers on regular town halls, structured manager Q&A sessions, and written updates that explain business context rather than just reporting outcomes. The distinction matters: a company-wide email announcing a reorg tells people what happened; a manager-led Q&A the same week tells them what it means for their roadmap, their equity, and their career path.

For teams at monday.com navigating MNDY stock movements or changes in sales territory structure, equity clarity is a specific retention lever. Employees whose questions about refresh timing and vesting schedules go unanswered during volatile quarters don't stay quiet; they quietly refresh LinkedIn. The fix is structural: assign a communication owner for each major business change, establish a written FAQ that managers update within 48 hours of any material announcement, and create a standing channel where questions are answered publicly rather than in one-off DMs.

Hybrid misalignment compounds the communication gap. When team members span Tel Aviv and Eastern time zones, asynchronous written updates are not optional; they are the floor. Managers who rely on in-room conversations to carry strategic context distribute that context unevenly, which registers to remote colleagues as exclusion and erodes the psychological safety that monday.com's guidance identifies as a core retention driver.

Manager enablement: the 1:1 that actually works

Global manager engagement fell from 30% to 27%, with engagement dropping five points specifically among managers under 35. Managers who are themselves disengaged cannot run effective 1:1s, and the downstream effect lands directly on team output. Burnout research shows that workers experiencing burnout are nearly three times more likely to be actively searching for another job compared with those who are not burned out, 45% versus 16%.

Monday.com's guidance recommends small, repeatable rituals: weekly manager syncs, quarterly calibration conversations, and immediate recognition programs. The emphasis on frequency over formality is deliberate. A 25-minute weekly 1:1 that follows a consistent agenda produces more retention value than an elaborate but infrequent quarterly review. Here is an agenda managers can adopt immediately:

• Energy and blockers (5 min): Ask one open question: "What's slowing you down most this week?" Note patterns across consecutive sessions. Rising blockers often forecast burnout before it shows up in output metrics.
• Cycle time and rework review (10 min): Walk through one active workstream. Where is time being lost? Is the same error type recurring? Rework is frequently a morale signal before it becomes a quality report.
• Career goal progress (10 min): Reference a documented goal from the team member's career plan. If no plan exists, use this block to start one. The completion rate of written career plans is one of the most operationalizable KPIs a people team can track.
• Recognition callout (5 min): Name one specific thing the team member did well since the last meeting. Specificity matters more than enthusiasm.

Practical support: the quarterly workload review

A Moodle study found that 66% of American workers experienced burnout in 2025. Separately, Mercer's Global Talent Trends research reports that 82% of workers are experiencing work-related stress in 2025. For managers, those percentages are less useful than a weekly habit of auditing the actual distribution of work on their teams.

Monday.com's guidance identifies flexible working arrangements, mental health resources, and clear performance expectations as the three pillars of practical support. In execution, they require a quarterly workload review cadence that most engineering and GTM managers skip during heavy delivery cycles, exactly when it's needed most. Run this checklist at the start of each quarter:

• Map every active project against sprint or quota capacity. Identify where one person is now carrying work that three people handled before the last reorg.
• Identify which AI tools in the team's stack are saving time and which are adding cognitive load without corresponding output gains. Tool overload is a morale depressant that rarely surfaces in retrospectives but shows up clearly in sick-day and absenteeism patterns.
• Flag any team member whose career plan hasn't been updated in 90 days. Stalled mobility conversations are a leading indicator of voluntary turnover, not a lagging one.
• Confirm that each team member knows the specific performance criteria by which they will be evaluated at the next review. Ambiguity about expectations is a quieter driver of attrition than compensation, and a cheaper one to fix.

The recognition cadence

Monday.com's guidance is specific here: recognition works best when it is immediate and repeatable rather than reserved for formal performance cycles. Mid-level contributors who are productive enough to leave without triggering an alarm are the segment most influenced by recognition frequency. A cadence that costs nothing to run:

• Immediate: Verbal or Slack acknowledgment within 24 hours of a notable delivery.
• Weekly: One specific callout in the team standup, tied to a behavior or outcome rather than a personality trait.
• Monthly: A brief written note logged in the team member's file or HR system. Two sentences are enough.
• Quarterly: A calibration conversation with an HRBP to identify promotion-ready individuals before a cycle opens, not during it.

Making morale work measurable

The most operationally useful aspect of monday.com's approach is its insistence on making morale practices trackable. For People Ops teams, that means converting the guidance into 90-day pilots with defined success metrics: Did 1:1 frequency increase? Did career plan completion rates improve? Did voluntary attrition in the pilot cohort diverge from baseline?

Engineering managers can build structured pairing and technical mentorship sessions into onboarding plans, tracking progress the same way they track sprint velocity. Sales and GTM leads benefit most from tying transparent business updates directly to incentive clarity, ensuring quota changes and territory shifts arrive with an explicit explanation of how the math works for each individual contributor.

More than half of U.S. workers, 51%, say they are watching for or actively seeking a new job. In a market where the talent most likely to leave is often the talent most capable of shipping the next feature or closing the next enterprise deal, deferring morale work is not a neutral choice. It shows up in cycle time, in rework rates, and eventually in attrition numbers that no hiring sprint can fully offset. The practices outlined here are inexpensive. The cost of skipping them is not.