I had one of those slightly surreal moments last week. A LinkedIn post I wrote about employee engagement seemed to strike a chord. By my standards, it did really well. Lots of comments, reposts and, more importantly, a really interesting conversation started underneath it.
What surprised me wasn’t that people agreed with the point I was making. It was that the point itself suddenly seemed… timely.
Because if I’m honest, it’s something I’ve been banging on about for the best part of seventeen years. When I founded People Lab back in 2009, employee engagement was already the big conversation. Every conference, every report and every board discussion seemed to revolve around the same question: How do we improve engagement?
The assumption was understandable. More engaged people perform better, stay longer, advocate for the organisation and deliver better outcomes. If engagement is linked to all those good things, then surely improving engagement should be the goal.
But something about that logic never quite sat comfortably with me. It felt as though we’d become obsessed with the measure rather than what the measure was actually telling us. Almost as if we were trying to make the thermometer read a different temperature instead of asking why the room felt cold in the first place.
That’s why we never really set out to build an employee engagement consultancy. We set out to build an employee experience consultancy. Back then, that wasn’t fashionable. In fact, the phrase “employee experience” barely featured in most organisations. Yet it seemed obvious to me that people didn’t arrive at work one morning and decide to be engaged.
- They responded to what they experienced.
- They experienced a manager who trusted them… or one who micromanaged them.
- They experienced leaders whose decisions matched their words… or leaders whose actions quietly undermined everything they said.
- They experienced systems that made work easier… or processes that made every day harder than it needed to be.
- They experienced opportunities to grow, to contribute, to feel listened to and to do meaningful work.
And from those thousands of small experiences, something bigger emerged. We happened to call it engagement.
That’s why the recent UK Employee Engagement Survey from Engage for Success caught my attention. Not because engagement remained stubbornly flat, sadly, that isn’t new…. but because the findings seemed to reinforce something many of us have suspected for years.
We know that where employees believe leaders genuinely prioritise people in their decision-making, engagement rises, and we need to ensure we don’t lose sight of this.
We’ve spent years trying to improve engagement when, in reality, engagement is one of the clearest indicators that people are already having a good experience at work.
It’s a lag measure, not the thing itself.
The irony is that I wrote a book called Employee Engagement. If I were writing it today, I’m not sure I’d choose the same title. Not because engagement has stopped mattering. Quite the opposite.
It’s because I now think we’ve allowed the word to become too narrow. Too often it becomes shorthand for surveys, scores and action plans, when what we’re really talking about is something much richer: the everyday experience of work.
- That’s where leadership lives.
- That’s where culture lives.
- That’s where trust, communication, learning, wellbeing and belonging all come together.
And perhaps that’s why conversations feel different now.
For years, organisations have become incredibly good at measuring engagement. Dashboards are better. Analytics are better. Benchmarking is better. Yet many are still asking why the numbers refuse to shift.
Maybe it’s because we’ve been trying to influence the outcome instead of improving the conditions that create it. We need to stop managing the metric and start designing the experience.
Because people don’t become engaged because we ask them how engaged they are. They become engaged because work feels different.
Looking back, I think that’s what People Lab has always been about. We just didn’t always have the language that exists today to describe it.
Perhaps the conversation is finally catching up. If you want to find out more about how we do this I’d love to hear from you!
