How does employee engagement really work? fixing the work, not the workers

Lead with EASE for Employee Engagement: fix the environment for the people

It has been said, but not always realised in employee engagement fixes:

"You can get whatever you want in this life if you help enough people get what they want." Zig Ziglar.

In this post we are going to take a look at what for some managers seems like a paradox, to understand the counter-intuitiveness of giving away control to Lead with EASE. You might ask, how can leadership work and enable the team to get what they want?

"Mastering the Art of Leading with EASE" delves deep into the strategies and mindset shifts you need to realign your goals and reclaim your growth path, with EASE. This week we address employee engagement with a clear message. Engagement is an outcome of good work design, sound management, and shared purpose. It is not a perk, a campaign, or a quarterly slogan.

Recent data underlines some of the challenges.

Global engagement has slipped to roughly one in five employees, and manager engagement has fallen further. In the United States, Gallup reports a mid-2025 engagement figure of 32 percent and notes that many employees remain detached and scanning for alternatives. Manager engagement has dropped to 27 percent in 2024, a rare and significant decline.

Burnout remains a major drag on performance and retention. Multiple surveys through 2024 and 2025 show high levels of exhaustion, with polls reporting that a large majority of workers experienced symptoms of burnout, and other large studies reporting similar patterns across regions and sectors.

At the same time, organisations are introducing artificial intelligence to drive productivity while struggling with a different constraint. The “infinite workday” is expanding, workloads feel relentless and always on. AI value is blocked when teams lack time and clarity to redesign work, or are uncertain about what is allowed.

In the United Kingdom, the quality of work shows stubborn gaps. The CIPD’s Good Work Index highlights persistent conflict and limited progress on job quality, which corrodes engagement and wellbeing.

So that is what it looks like for everyone else it seems. What does it look like for you and your team.  How can you change this statistical environment so that it is not relevant to where you work?

The problem beneath the symptoms

Unfortunately, many engagement efforts focus on quick fixes of mood rather than mechanisms, despite the evidence of its inadequacy. Pizza lunches, surveys, and inspirational posters may feel supportive, yet they do not change task clarity, decision rights, workload, or learning. Worse they may serve to highlight dissonance between espoused values and actual behaviours. Engagement may grow when people have a fair workload, a voice that is heard, meaningful goals, and the skills and autonomy to deliver. Purpose, autonomy, self-detemination and capability (Deci and Ryan SDT, Banduras, Self efficacy)

A useful lens is the Job Demands–Resources perspective (Demerouti et al). Unsurorisingly, when demands are high and resources are low, exhaustion and withdrawal increase. However, when resources rise, such as autonomy, feedback, development, and supportive leadership, energy and commitment also rise despite high demands. The lesson is simple. Fix the environment, not the people.

Did you know that in the UK (and other jurisdictions) you have an obligation under Health and Safety law to manage and mitigates sources of workplace stress?

Find out more here and access free resources to identify issues, and read on.

Three common engagement myths to retire

Myth 1: “Surveys are engagement.”

‍Pulse data can help, but over-surveying without visible change creates cynicism. Publish what you heard, say what will change, and close the loop.  Makesuretat surveys are no thte only engagement mechanism. Empower managers and teams to fix their open issues.

Myth 2: “Perks are popular.”

‍Treats, like comfort eating, do not offset unclear roles, unnecessary meetings, or unfair processes, pay or rewards. A high score in satisfaction for many does not remove the dissatisfaction of what may seem like an outlier group. Improve role clarity, simplify approvals, and make workloads sustainable. Herzberg reminds us that to improve workplace satisfaction we must first remove the sources of dissatisfaction. Who values what perks and why?

Offsites, workshops and team building events can be a great source of truth and energy, but if they seem like time off where going back to work deflates the energy created then take another look at your environment.

Myth 3: “AI and technology will solve capacity issues.”

‍AI adoption may accelerate value and increase noise. Without redesigned workflows and decision rules, people may simply work longer, feel undervalued or de-skilled. Outputs and Outcomes need to be balanced and we need to be careful about what gets measured. Co-create time and reduce effort by stopping low-value tasks before adding new tools. Why are we here and who cares?

Combining the insights of Drucker and Goodheart I suggest:

"What get's measured gets managed, so be careful about what you measure because when a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure."

Life is not a zero sum game of win or lose, it just appears that way at times.  Life is an infinite game where we need to think about what is valued and our trajectory of success, win-win, alignment with others and any sources of dissatisfaction, such as guilt or shame, the might sometimes be sociopathically nullified by pay and rewards.

Technology for the most part enhances human lives, so make sure it has a point.

Find a better way with EASE

One great challenge in self mastery is to know what we do not know, as much as what we do know and how we know, for this will challenge us to seek knowledge and create wisdom. As we work with teams this challenge can be eased as much as it may create more issues. Adding AI to our teams can be more problematic than adding new staff members, because most of us are somewhat lacking in competence in this new technology and what it means. So here is the opportunity to Lead with EASE.

Explore: understand the real work

• Conduct a one-week activity sample with a representative team. What proportion of time is spent on urgent requests, rework, unclear tasks, and deep work.
• Ask three questions in every review. What is actually happening? What are we assuming and not checking? What is missing from our understanding?
• Identify two demands to remove and two resources to add this quarter, for example decision clarity and protected focus time.

Align: create shared intent and simple rules

• Consider reciprocating pledges among team members. Write a one-page “commander’s intent” for the quarter. Outcome, boundaries, and trade-offs. Ask for the team to pledge how they will succeed in delivering it.
• Replace generic priorities with a single ranked list. Agree what will not be done and do not leave it to chance or time to make that decision. Priority is arguably never a plural.
• Use a brief and back-brief rhythm, decision journals. The leader explains intent, the team confirms understanding in their own words and takes action. De-brief what went right, what needs improvement, what must change.

Support: build safety, skills, and stamina

• Establish a “no surprises” rule. Surface risks early with options, not complaints.
• Protect learning time. One hour per fortnight for skill practice or cross-training.
• Normalise short after-action reviews. What happened, what helped, what hindered, what will we change.

Empower: give real authority with real guardrails

• Define authority levels for common decisions. Do exactly as instructed, seek approval before acting, act and report afterwards, or act autonomously within parameters.
• Delegate to where the information is, and pair ownership with a clear measure of success.
• Recognise learning and effort, not only outcomes. Trust grows when progress is visible.

Use these tools to move from reactive to proactive, enable tactics which are supported by strategy

If you want to create leadership and high performance at every level in your organisation you need a combination of clarity, competence and shared intent.

1) The Eisenhower Matrix for teams

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Run a quarterly workshop where the team sorts major activities into urgent and important quadrants together

• Urgent and important: resource properly, reduce in number.
• Important, not urgent: schedule and protect, this is growth work.
• Urgent, not important: delegate or automate.
• Neither: eliminate or defer with a conscious choice.

2) A JD-R mini-audit

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Job Demands can be High and engaging if Resources to support them are adequate. This is perhaps why cost cutting and other resource reduction measures can be so damaging to productivity. However, consensus and shared alignment can be a resource too.

List the top three demands and top three resources that support them for the team today. Be brutally honest, and seek dissent to keep this real.

Choose one demand to reduce and one resource to increase within sixty days and figure out how it might be done together.

Review the impact and repeat quarterly.

Align your changes to your strategy and maintain resonance not dissonance.

Consider a full or partial Management Standards Audit by UK HSE here

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3) Understand Epistemic Value

A quick refresher on epistemic value
When we assess a claim, six criteria help us keep our footing:

• Accuracy: does it fit reality.
• Consistency: does it cohere with our other well-supported beliefs.
• Simplicity: are we leaning on the fewest assumptions.
• Scope: how much of the world does it explain.
• Explanatory power: does it make sense of what we see.
• Predictive accuracy: does it anticipate what happens next.

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Employee Engagement Matters, so beware of Engagement Theatre

If two or more statements are true, you may be performing engagement rather than improving work. Cynicism moves fast under these conditions.

• We run frequent surveys - people rarely see or agree with what changed.
• We invest in perks - workloads remain excessive.
• Managers have access to training - Time for training is limited and our culture is inconsistent or hard to explain.
• Meetings are frequent - most meetings lack a clear decision owner or next action.
• We tried to change- AI pilots and other changes, create more work for the same people without removing anything.

If this looks familiar, begin with EASE. Improve the work and the environment. The scores will change.

Try this in the next fourteen days

• Hold a thirty-minute alignment session to agree the top three priorities and two things that will stop.
• Run a ten-minute after-action review on the last missed deadline. Capture one system change.
• Map decision authority for a single process and remove one unnecessary approval, (especially effective if that approval removed is you).
• If something is not working then pause and reflect before stopping or continuing with adjustments

Ready, Aim, Fire! Observe and Adjust.  Fire for Effect

Why this matters now

Employees are more likely to stay, grow, and recommend the organisation when managers and they are engaged and the work is designed well. If your Manager engagement is falling then how can they help their team? If burnout is high everywhere and workloads are expanding then addressing the mechanics of work is the most reliable route to better engagement and better results.

Together we can make your team the exceptional to the rule.

We can change the environment where we work and outperform the competition, who are stuck in these statistics

Together we can redesign work and succeed

Sources and further reading

• Gallup, mid-2025 engagement update and analysis of U.S. trends. Gallup.com
• Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2024 and 2025 commentary on global engagement levels and manager engagement. Gallup.com+1
• Microsoft Work Trend Index 2025, workload and the “infinite workday” barrier to AI value. Microsoft+1
• CIPD Good Work Index 2024, job quality and workplace conflict in the UK. Blake Morgan
• NAMI Workplace Mental Health Poll 2024 and other burnout reports. NAMI+1

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© 2025 James Hardie – Course Correction Consulting Ltd. The EASE Framework™ is a proprietary model developed by James Hardie to support the creation of psychologically safe, empowered, and strategically aligned teams. All rights reserved.

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