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. There's a reason engagement became the gold standard of workplace metrics."

Organizations possess abundant tools to measure employee engagement, yet many workers report increasing disconnection, loneliness, turnover, and team friction. Engagement metrics capture motivation and discretionary effort but do not measure the relational ties that make work sustainable, creative, and human. Contemporary workforce trends include higher baseline anxiety, weaker social skills from smartphone-centered adolescence, and reduced face-to-face interaction. The irreplaceable human dimension of future work is relational labor—empathy, attunement, and presence—that AI cannot replicate. Engagement surveys were developed for a different era and remain a useful signal, but they are insufficient alone; connectedness must be measured to assess long-term team thriving.

Read at Fast Company