Your Engagement Surveys Are Lying to You. Here’s What You Should Measure Instead.

I’ve spent the last three decades working side by side with some of the world’s most admired organizations — Starbucks, The Ritz-Carlton, Chick-fil-A, KeyBank, Lexus — helping them build cultures where both employees and customers genuinely thrive. And in that time, I’ve watched the same troubling pattern repeat itself: companies invest enormous energy into employee engagement scores while their people quietly fall apart.

Let that sink in. Your employees can score “engaged” on every survey you send them while feeling profoundly disconnected, invisible, and isolated. They can believe in the mission and still have no one at work they can genuinely confide in. They can exceed their metrics while feeling like they don’t matter to a single person in the building.

This is the defining paradox of modern work: we measure engagement obsessively, yet loneliness, turnover, and team friction keep rising. The reason is simple — engagement surveys were built for a world that no longer exists.

Why Engagement Worked Then — And Why It’s Failing Now

In my book with co-author Dave Murray, The Employee Experience Revolution, we make the point plainly: “Your customers will never be any happier than your employees. Your people create and deliver the experience that keeps customers coming back.” That’s not a feel-good platitude. It’s a business reality backed by decades of research and reinforced in every client engagement I’ve led.

For years, engagement was a genuinely useful signal. It told us whether people were motivated, whether they cared about the mission, whether they were willing to go above and beyond. In the industrial, co-located workplaces of that era, high engagement reliably predicted high performance.

The Remote Work Paradox

But we’re not in that world anymore. Today’s workplace is hybrid, distributed, digitally mediated, and increasingly isolating. Recent data from Archie analyzing January 2026 trends reveals a striking contradiction: fully remote workers report higher engagement (31%) than hybrid or on-site workers (23%). Yet only 36% of those remote workers say they’re “thriving” in life, compared to 42% of hybrid workers — and 45% of remote employees felt significant stress the previous day, versus 39% for on-site workers.

High engagement sitting atop fragile relational foundations. That is the crisis we’re facing. And if you’re only measuring engagement, you’re completely blind to it.

The Real Problem: We’re Measuring Motivation When We Should Be Measuring Connection

Here’s what 30 years of building world-class cultures has taught me: motivation is no longer the primary bottleneck. The bottleneck is relational capacity — the ability of your people to work together, navigate conflict, build trust, and collaborate across distance and difference.

The Accidental Manager Crisis

In The Employee Experience Revolution, Dave and I spend significant time on the transition from what we call “accidental managers” to intentional leaders. According to a 2023 Chartered Management Institute study, 82% of managers hold their positions without adequate training — up from 68% in 2019. These accidental managers erode the relational fabric of teams not out of malice, but out of a fundamental lack of preparation for the human side of leadership.

I see it constantly in my consulting work. A team scores well on engagement. The mission resonates. Compensation is competitive. But performance is stagnant, turnover is climbing, and nobody can explain why. Almost always, when we dig deeper, the problem isn’t motivation — it’s connection. People don’t feel seen by their manager. Cross-functional collaboration is riddled with quiet distrust. Someone critical to the operation is one bad quarter away from walking out the door.

Gallup research analyzed by HR Executive in April 2025 confirms this: engaged employees are 64% less likely to report feeling lonely than disengaged employees. But — and this is critical — the inverse doesn’t necessarily hold. You can be engaged and still feel profoundly alone. Engagement measures individual sentiment. It does not measure the strength of the relationships that actually predict whether your organization performs.

Engagement tells you whether people are motivated. Connectedness tells you whether they’re thriving. Engagement is a lagging indicator. Connectedness is a leading one.

What to Measure Instead: Connectedness

In The Relationship Economy, I wrote about a fundamental shift that was already underway — the move from a transactional world to a relational one. Technology has automated virtually every transaction that can be automated. What it cannot replicate is the human connection that creates loyalty, trust, and genuine commitment. The relationship economy isn’t a concept. It’s the competitive reality every leader is operating in right now, whether they’ve named it or not.

The irony is that as the relationship economy has become more critical, most organizations have doubled down on measuring the wrong thing. Engagement tells you whether your people are motivated. It cannot tell you whether the relationships that actually drive performance — between teammates, between managers and direct reports, across functions — are healthy, fraying, or quietly falling apart.

In my 30 years of consulting work, I’ve come to believe that the real health of a culture lives not in how individuals feel about the organization in the abstract, but in the quality of the relationships between the people doing the work every day. Here are the things I’d want every leader paying attention to:

• 1 Relational trust. Every high-performing team I’ve worked with — at Chick-fil-A, The Ritz-Carlton, KeyBank, and dozens of organizations less famous but just as excellent — shares one foundational quality: the people genuinely trust each other. Not blindly. Not perfectly. But enough to be honest, admit mistakes, and believe their teammates have their backs. Google’s Project Aristotle found that psychological safety was the single greatest predictor of team effectiveness — above individual talent, above technical skill, above compensation. That safety is built through hundreds of small daily interactions. When it breaks down, no engagement score saves you.
• 2 Belonging — the real kind. Leaders hear “belonging” and think pizza parties and culture committees. Those things are fine, but they decorate the surface of something much deeper. True belonging is the feeling that your absence would be noticed. That your perspective is sought, not just tolerated. That you are essential to something larger than yourself. Deloitte research found that 79% of employees say fostering belonging matters to organizational success, and 93% say it drives performance. When people genuinely belong, they stay and they give everything.
• 3 The freedom to tell the truth. One of the clearest signals of a healthy culture is what happens when someone disagrees with the boss — or surfaces a problem leadership doesn’t want to hear. In my work with The Ritz-Carlton, one of the most powerful practices I’ve observed is the daily “lineup” — a brief all-hands huddle where anyone at any level can raise a concern, flag a failure, or celebrate a win. It works because leaders have spent years building the relational trust that makes honesty safe. Without that safety, problems go underground and the people closest to the customer learn to keep their mouths shut.
• 4 Purpose that is lived, not laminated. In The Relationship Economy, I talk about the difference between organizations that display their values and those that deliver them daily. Purpose isn’t a poster on the wall. It’s the lived experience of understanding how your work connects to something that matters. The difference between “I process insurance claims” and “I help families rebuild after something devastating happened” is not just framing — it’s the difference between showing up and showing up with heart.
• 5 Collaboration that actually flows. Engagement surveys measure how individuals feel about the organization. But work doesn’t happen in individuals — it happens in the spaces between them. Between departments. Across functions. In the handoffs where everything either accelerates or quietly dies. Some of the most revealing diagnostics I’ve run simply map how work moves through an organization — who is isolated, who is overloaded, where the invisible bottlenecks live.
• 6 Feeling genuinely seen. This is what engagement surveys miss almost entirely — and in my experience, what drives more quiet departures than almost anything else. In The Relationship Economy, I write about the power of making people feel known, not just employed. According to Primeast’s analysis of 2025 data, only 3 in 10 employees received meaningful recognition in the past week. That’s not an HR problem. That’s a leadership problem.

How to Start Measuring Connectedness in Your Organization

Here’s the good news: you don’t have to tear up your engagement surveys. You need to augment them with a connectedness lens. Based on our work in The Employee Experience Revolution and three decades of client work, here’s a practical starting point:

1. Run quarterly connection pulses. Short, high-frequency surveys with questions that measure relationships, not just satisfaction. Do you feel connected to the people you work closely with? Do you have someone at work you can be real with? Does cross-team collaboration feel trusting and safe? These are the questions that reveal what’s actually happening beneath the engagement scores.
2. Map your relational networks. Use organizational network analysis to identify who’s isolated, who’s overloaded, and where collaboration is quietly breaking down. This isn’t surveillance — it’s leadership intelligence. It makes the invisible structure of your culture visible so you can act on it.
3. Assess leader relational credibility. A 360-style relational assessment: do employees feel seen, supported, challenged, and understood by their direct managers? Manager quality is the single greatest driver of employee experience, yet only 44% of managers have received any management training. Closing that gap is where culture transformation actually begins.
4. Measure collaboration friction. Identify where cross-functional trust is breaking down, even in departments with strong individual engagement scores. This is where projects die, timelines slip, and talented people get quietly demoralized.
5. Find the enthusiastic but invisible. These are your most dangerous retention risks — people who genuinely care about the mission but feel unseen by leadership. According to Gallup, manager engagement fell from 30% to 27% between 2023 and 2024 — the steepest drop of any worker group. These are your canaries. Find them before they leave.
6. Replace annual reviews with monthly conversations. Formal review cycles are lagging indicators. The connective tissue of a culture is built in consistent, meaningful one-on-ones where managers ask real questions and actually listen. That’s where trust is built, problems are surfaced early, and people feel genuinely seen — not once a year, but continuously.

The Business Case for Measuring Connectedness

Let me be direct: this isn’t a feel-good HR initiative. This is a business imperative with a staggering price tag attached to inaction. According to Gallup’s June 2024 research, low employee engagement costs the global economy $8.9 trillion — 9% of global GDP. That’s the cost of people showing up without connecting. Of organizations measuring the wrong things and wondering why performance never quite gets there.

Connected teams innovate more readily, recover from setbacks faster, navigate conflict with less collateral damage, and execute complex work with fewer delays. In our consulting work, Dave and I have seen this pattern play out hundreds of times: organizations that prioritize connectedness don’t just have happier employees — they have measurably better outcomes.

And the cost of getting this wrong? According to Quantum Workplace’s 2024 trends report, disengaged employees are 2.6 times more likely to leave for a better culture. But disengagement isn’t the real problem — disconnection is. Because you can re-engage a motivated employee. You cannot re-engage someone who has already decided, somewhere deep down, that they are fundamentally alone in this organization.

Your engagement surveys aren’t lying to you. They’re just telling you the wrong story. The real story — the one that determines whether your organization thrives or slowly hollows out — lives in the connections between your people.

The Employee Experience Revolution Starts with Connection

In The Employee Experience Revolution, Dave Murray and I make the argument that the Great Resignation, Quiet Quitting, and the broader breakdown of workplace loyalty are not indictments of employees. They are indictments of leaders who stopped — or never started — genuinely caring for the people in their charge. Today’s employees are more selective than ever about where they invest themselves. They are insisting, quietly but firmly, that their work be part of a life worth living.

But you cannot build that culture while measuring the wrong things.

The U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic in 2023. The workplace is one of the primary places adults seek connection — and right now, we are failing them at scale. That gap between where we are and where we should be is filled with disconnection, isolation, and untapped human potential.

Start measuring connectedness. Start protecting it. Start building it with the same intentionality you bring to your financial targets. Because in the end, connectedness isn’t just a better metric. It’s the foundation everything else is built on.