Are you a leader of the first workplace?

If you work with young people, whether you’re in the classroom, in district leadership, or pursuing an educational doctorate degree, you’re already shaping how they’ll experience work for the rest of their lives. The first real workplace they know isn’t a cubicle or a Zoom call, it’s the classroom, and when leaders get the learning culture right, students become more hopeful, more engaged and more ready for what comes next. You’re effectively running their first organisation, with norms, expectations and feedback loops that feel very similar to what they’ll encounter later in their careers.

In the 2025 Voices of Gen Z study, Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation surveyed nearly 3,800 Gen Z respondents across the United States and found that almost six in ten middle and high school students now feel prepared for the future, an 11?point jump in just one year, with all eight measures of classroom engagement at their highest level since 2023. Yet Gallup’s 2023 data on US employees show that only about 33 percent are engaged, half are not engaged, and 16 percent are actively disengaged, contributing to an estimated 1.9 trillion dollars in lost productivity. That gap is exactly where empowered US education leaders can change the story.

Classrooms as Real Workplaces

Engagement in school is not just “nice to have”. It’s predictive of how students feel about life and their futures. In the same Gen Z research, students who report experiences like doing what they do best at school and having a teacher who makes them excited about the future are far more likely to say they’re thriving and ready for life after graduation. These are the same kinds of experiences that show up in adult engagement surveys as drivers of commitment and performance at work, which makes your daily decisions about learning culture feel even more consequential.

National data also show the stakes. In 2024 the National Center for Education Statistics reported that about a quarter of US public schools described student lack of focus as having a severe negative impact on learning in 2023–24. Studies of classroom climate and teacher wellbeing back this up, finding that warm, structured social climates are linked to higher academic engagement and fewer behaviour problems, while stressful, low?support environments undermine both learning and mental health. In practice, that means your schedule, behaviour expectations and staffing patterns are quietly teaching students what “work” feels like long before any employer does.

Schools as Strength Labs

Teachers already know what boosts engagement. In the Gradient Learning Poll on student engagement, 78 percent of US educators named stronger teacher–student relationships as one of the most effective ways to increase engagement, and many also highlighted connecting learning to real?world skills and tapping student interests. Your role is to design a school where they actually have time and support to do that day in and day out, not just during special projects or themed weeks.

Professional learning is one of your sharpest tools. A research brief from Nebraska’s Multi?tiered System of Support reports that teachers who received about 49 hours of focused professional development improved their students’ achievement by roughly 21 percentile points compared with control groups, while short, one?off workshops rarely moved results. Broader research on teacher learning points in the same direction: sustained, collaborative, practice?focused learning changes teaching and raises outcomes. One practical starting point is to organise brief, job?embedded “learning sprints” where teams co?design an engagement strategy, test it, look at student responses, then refine together. Over time, this makes experimentation part of the culture, not a one?off event.

You can test specific leadership moves around engagement, gather data, and share what works with colleagues who face similar challenges. That blend of scholarly insight and lived school experience is exactly what turns individual schools into learning-first systems.

Homeroom to Human Resources

The culture students experience under your leadership becomes their internal template for what leadership, feedback and growth should feel like at work. When a teenager spends years in classrooms where they can use their strengths, understand why the work matters and feel known by at least one adult, those become their baseline expectations for any future team.

That’s why the contrast with current workplace data matters. Gallup’s US employee engagement figures show a country where most adults no longer experience work as a place to learn, grow or feel recognised. Your schools can act as a counterweight to current workplace trends by normalising a different pattern:

• Establish clear expectations so students consistently know what success looks like.
• Provide meaningful feedback that helps students understand their progress and next steps.
• Create real chances to grow, with opportunities to build new skills and take on responsibility.
• Model leaders who invest in people as whole human beings, not just performers of tasks.

Leaders Who Learn, Cultures That Last

Student engagement is clearly movable, and when US education leaders use what the evidence already tells us, more young people leave school feeling ready and optimistic about their futures. By treating your school as a strength lab for both students and staff, backing serious professional learning and protecting time to know learners well, you’re not only improving test results, you’re shaping what the next generation will one day demand from every workplace they enter and lead. As you think about your next leadership decisions, from timetables to PD days, it’s worth asking: will your graduates remember school as the place that taught them to endure work, or the place that taught them to love learning wherever they find it?