“Yikes!” That’s what I say when I think about the number of employee engagement tools out there. We’re spending more on them every year, yet there’s growing confusion over which assessments and interventions are making a difference.

To help separate fact from fiction and demystify the science of engagement, I asked three questions of my colleague Paul M. Mastrangelo, a managing consultant for CultureIQ, which helps organizations improve their culture. Here they are, with his responses.

What is the most common misinformation about employee engagement?

The most egregious claim is that more than two-thirds of workers are not engaged. The headline of a commonly cited 2014 Forbes contributed article is “70% of Workers Aren’t Engaged—What About the Managers?” (That figure comes from a 2013 Gallup report, which an earlier contributed Forbes piece dismissed as inaccurate.) The headline suggests that something is inherently wrong with workers, managers, companies, HR practices or some combination of them all. It grabs your attention, but is it accurate? No. The text belies the headline, suggesting that far more than 30 percent of employees are engaged. The rest of the piece, however, puts aside the topic of which numbers are more accurate and focuses on other issues.

Perhaps the most powerful evidence to bust the 70 percent disengagement claim was presented earlier this year at a conference of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, where specialists from separate firms shared five remarkably consistent engagement scores. They all showed that between 61 percent and 72 percent of workers are engaged, despite their different definitions and data collection methods. 

What trends in the survey industry are affecting organizations’ practices?

The industry tends to overreport flagging engagement and the resulting damage it causes—which creates a bias toward inaction. Leaders who see organizational scores of 60 percent engagement will not make many changes if they believe the bogus claim that the base line among U.S. employees is 30 percent; they’ll think they’re already way ahead.

This myth also focuses on what organizations lack instead of leveraging what they have. You can’t harness engagement if you think it’s not there. Once you know that your fuel tank is much more full, you can address problems such as ineffective change management, poor cross-departmental cooperation and misalignment of culture to strategy.

What should HR leaders look for when evaluating engagement data?

Are your vendors or survey professionals manipulating the data? Ask how they report the percentage of people who “agree or strongly agree” with statements such as “I am proud to work for my company” and “I would recommend my organization as a great place to work.” Do their criteria for being engaged require strong agreement with more than one statement? If so, that would account for lower scores. Using such concurrent agreement measures is not exactly false, but it is misleading—and self-serving, like a boy crying wolf who just happens to sell wolf repellent.

Navigating engagement can be one of the trickiest aspects of leadership. But the only way to truth is to separate myth from fact. Start getting clarity on employee engagement by examining your own efforts, then learn more about key trends. Happy myth busting!