Background: Employee engagement has received much attention by practitioners and scholars in the last decade, yet engagement is declining among employees and today only 16 percent of the Swedish work force is engaged in their job. Engaged employees are desired since they enhance organizational performance outcomes and employee wellbeing. The importance of time has been confirmed in other contexts, but no previous research has looked at time as an impact factor of employee engagement. Discovering how time influences engagement, may extend the understanding of the concept.

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to discover how employee engagement is influenced by the time of the day and the day of the week. The ambition is to contribute to a better understanding of this concept by adding this time aspect to it. This will assist managers to improve employee engagement strategies in order to increase engagement in the work place.

Method: To fulfil the purpose of this study, a qualitative exploratory study was conducted with a critical realist approach. Data was collected by in-depth, semi-structured interviews. 13 participants took part of the study, selected through purposive and snowball sampling. The data was then analyzed by following the seven steps of grounded analysis.

Conclusion: The findings show that most employees follow a daily pattern of engagement in accordance to the daily pattern of mood and performance; a peak in the morning, a dip in the afternoon, and a recovery in the early evening. However, not all employees follow this pattern, some are instead more engaged just before going home. This indicates that the daily pattern of engagement is individual and depends on the person’s chronotype, i.e. biological clock. The weekly employee engagement is not as significant. The findings show that Mondays and Fridays differentiate from the other days of the week when it comes to engagement. This may be partly explained by the impact of beginnings and endings, but need to be further researched. Time influences engagement and therefore managers must take this into account in employee engagement strategies by matching people’s chronotypes with the work schedule.