Stop tracking employee engagement. Try this instead

Companies have never had more tools to measure engagement, yet employees have never reported feeling more disconnected.

It’s one of the defining paradoxes of modern work: Engagement scores are the obsession of many organizations, yet loneliness, turnover, and team friction are rising. People are completing their tasks but not always experiencing the relationships that make work sustainable, creative, or truly human. Engagement measures motivation, whereas connectedness assesses whether people can work effectively together over time.

Many researchers and thinkers have named the forces shaping the future of work. Jonathan Haidt, in The Anxious Generation, highlights how today’s workforce arrives with higher baseline anxiety and weaker social muscles, shaped by smartphone-centered adolescence and a decline in face-to-face interaction. Sociologist Allison Pugh, in The Last Human Job, argues that the only irreplaceable work humans will do in the future is relational, involving empathy, attunement, and presence, the distinctively human capacities that AI cannot replicate.

Given all this, why are organizations still leaning so heavily on engagement surveys, tools that were built decades ago for a radically different world of work? Because engagement has historically been a useful signal. However, in today’s context, it is insufficient. Engagement indicates whether people are motivated, whereas connectedness indicates whether people can thrive.

When Engagement Worked and Why It No Longer Does

There’s a reason engagement became the gold standard of workplace metrics. According to Kevin Kruse, a serial entrepreneur and best-selling author, engagement reflects the emotional commitment employees feel toward their organization—the psychological spark behind discretionary effort. Engaged employees often deliver higher productivity, better customer service, and stronger alignment with the company’s purpose. For years, engagement surveys have helped leaders understand motivation at scale. In the industrial, colocated workplaces for which they were designed, engagement was a reasonable proxy for performance.

But motivation is no longer the primary bottleneck. The bottleneck is relational capacity: people’s ability to work together, navigate conflict, build trust, and collaborate across distance and difference. Today, an employee can be engaged with their tasks while feeling profoundly disconnected from their team. They can care about the mission yet feel invisible in meetings. They can exceed goals while having no one at work they can confide in.

High engagement can sit atop fragile relational foundations. In hybrid and distributed work, it often does. Engagement indicates whether people are enthusiastic, while connectedness indicates whether an organization is healthy.

Why Engagement No Longer Matches the Moment

The central challenge facing leaders is not effort, it’s isolation. The U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 Advisory called loneliness a “public health epidemic,” noting that the workplace is one of the primary places where adults seek connection. Hybrid work has weakened casual social ties, while digital communication has reduced emotional nuance. Younger workers, raised in online ecosystems, often arrive less practiced in conflict resolution, spontaneous dialogue, and relational risk-taking, all core ingredients of high-functioning teams. Employees may be engaged but unable to speak candidly, trust teammates, navigate differences, ask for help, or integrate into a cohesive whole.

As Moe, a workplace culture expert and bestselling author, often says: “People thrive when they feel seen, not just surveyed.” Engagement surveys weren’t designed to measure visibility, they were designed to measure satisfaction, and satisfaction does not predict resilience.

What Connectedness Actually Measures

Connectedness is not a vibe, it is a measurable set of relational conditions that determine whether people can do complex, interdependent work together. We define connectedness as “The degree to which people feel seen, supported, trusted, and in meaningful relationships with the humans they rely on to do their work.”

Connectedness captures dimensions that engagement simply doesn’t:

1. Relational Trust. Do people believe their colleagues have their backs? Trust is a well-established predictor of team performance and psychological bravery.

2. Belonging. A sense of belonging reduces turnover risk, buffers stress, and improves collaboration. Deloitte reports that 79% of employees surveyed said fostering belonging was important to organizational success, and 93% agreed belonging drives organizational performance.

3. Psychological Bravery. Can employees disagree productively? Tell the truth? Take interpersonal risks? Bravery is what fuels innovation and healthy conflict.

4. Purpose and Meaning. Clarity of purpose is not a strategic artifact, it is relational glue. It helps employees understand not only what they do but also why they matter.

5. Network Strength and Collaboration Flow. This reflects how well people work together across teams, not just how they feel about the organization in the abstract.

6. Feeling Seen. Employees do not require perfection, but they do require recognition of their humanity: their story, their needs, their contributions.

Allison Pugh’s research underscores this point: These relational dimensions are the very aspects of work that machines cannot automate. “The irreplaceable human contribution,” she writes, “is connection itself.”

Connectedness Predicts Performance Better Than Engagement Does

Why is connectedness more predictive than engagement? Research across organizational psychology, sociology, and network science consistently shows that connected teams:

• Innovate more easily
• Recover from setbacks faster
• Handle conflict with less damage
• Execute complex work with fewer delays
• Experience lower burnout and turnover

Google’s Project Aristotle famously found that psychological safety—a relational variable—was the top predictor of team effectiveness, beating out individual talent and skill mix. In hybrid and in-person work, it is the strength of relationships, not individual sentiment scores, that determines the speed of collaboration, cross-functional problem-solving, and execution resilience. Engagement fuels effort while connectedness fuels performance.

How Leaders Can Start Measuring Connectedness Today

This is where leaders typically ask: “Okay, but how do we measure something as intangible as connectedness?” Here’s a practical playbook from our combined work:

1. Quarterly Connection Pulses. Short, frequent surveys with questions such as: 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?

2. Relationship Network Mapping. Organizational network analysis, a method of mapping networks in organizations, can identify bottlenecks, isolated individuals, and overloaded “super-connectors.”

3. Leader Relational Credibility Index. A relational 360: Do people feel seen, supported, safe, challenged, and understood by their leaders?

4. Collaboration Friction Score. Identify where function-to-function trust is breaking down, even when engagement is high.

5. Belonging Gaps. Identify individuals who are enthusiastic but invisible, the group most vulnerable to burnout and turnover.

6. Monthly Meet-Ups. Replace or refine annual performance reviews with regular, meaningful two-way dialogue between the people leader and the employee.

These tools shift leaders from watching scores to watching stories, the lived relational realities within their teams. To build connected organizations, leaders must shift from driving engagement to designing relational ecosystems and from motivating individuals to strengthening networks. 

In Tony’s work designing relational leadership experiences, we call this creating Campfires of Connection: intentional spaces where people can speak bravely, listen deeply, and reconnect with the purpose behind their work. In Moe’s research, this is the Heart Habit of leadership: showing up with curiosity, presence, and attunement so people feel truly seen. In a world where isolation is rising and trust is fraying, connectedness is a strategic capability, and it’s time leaders start measuring what matters most.

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