We are very quick to describe employees as disengaged.
Maybe they have stopped volunteering for extra work, contribute less in meetings or seem to have less energy than they once did. They are still doing the job, but with less enthusiasm, initiative or willingness to stretch beyond what is required. Once that label sticks, the conversation usually turns to the employee. How do we re-engage them? Does their manager need to recognize them more? Would development opportunities help? Do we need another wellbeing initiative?
I think we sometimes start in the wrong place.
Before deciding that an employee has an engagement problem, it is worth asking what they are being asked to engage with. A job can become difficult to care about when priorities change every week, good work goes unnoticed, decisions make little sense, meetings consume half the day and the person managing you creates more work than they remove. Add a few rounds of restructuring, a smaller team and an expectation to “do more with less,” and pulling back starts to look less like a motivation problem.
Sometimes it is a reasonable response to the way work has been designed.
We have built an industry around improving the employee
There is no shortage of things organizations can buy to improve engagement: Recognition platforms, wellness programs, learning libraries, manager training, performance systems, engagement surveys and people analytics dashboards.
Many of them are useful. I work in this industry, so I am certainly not suggesting otherwise.
The issue is what happens when we keep adding interventions without looking closely enough at the conditions creating the problem. Consider an employee who is showing signs of burnout. They receive access to a meditation app and a webinar about resilience, while their manager continues assigning work without clear priorities and contacting them at all hours.
Or a manager is sent to leadership training because their team’s engagement score is low. They attend a good session, return to work and immediately walk back into an environment where they are managing twelve people, carrying an individual workload and being pulled into meetings most of the day.
Neither intervention is necessarily bad. It just may have very little relationship to the actual problem.
Managers have far more influence than most programs
One of the reasons I keep coming back to managers is that employees experience so much of an organization through them. A manager influences what gets prioritized, how feedback is delivered, whether someone feels trusted, whether workloads are noticed and whether development conversations ever happen. They also translate company decisions into everyday reality.
Gallup has found that the manager or team leader accounts for 70% of the variance in team-level engagement. That is an enormous amount of influence sitting with people who are often promoted because they were good at their previous job, then expected to figure management out as they go.
I know that experience personally.
When I first became a manager, nobody needed to convince me that I cared about my team. I did. The problem was that caring did not automatically make me good at managing them. Organizations sometimes treat manager effectiveness the same way. We give someone training, provide a framework and assume good management will follow. When it does not, another training program gets added.
But managers do not need the same support at the same time.
The issue will look different from one team to another. One may be struggling with recognition, another with workload, while a third has little confidence in its manager. In some cases, the manager may actually be doing most things well while broader organizational decisions are damaging the employee experience. A generic solution misses those differences.
Engagement scores can hide where the work is breaking down
Company-wide numbers are attractive because they are easy to understand. Engagement is 74. Burnout risk increased three points. Confidence in leadership declined. Recognition improved. This is all useful information, but very little work actually happens at the company-average level.
People experience work inside teams. That is where the manager behaves a certain way, priorities become clear or confusing, workloads become manageable or unreasonable, and employees decide whether they have enough support to keep going.
This is one of the ideas behind how we have been building Optimo.
Rather than stopping at a broad workforce score, the model looks for emerging burnout, attrition and performance barriers, identifies where they are showing up, and then connects those signals to specific actions a manager can realistically take. The intention is to make the insight different depending on who is looking at it. An executive needs to understand organizational exposure. HR needs to know where support should be prioritized. A manager needs something much more immediate: what is happening with my team, and what can I do about it?
That last part is particularly important. Telling a manager their team has an engagement problem is diagnosis without much treatment.
The intervention should match the problem
HR has a tendency to scale and it makes sense. If you are responsible for hundreds or thousands of people, you cannot design a completely separate people strategy for every team. But some problems do require a more targeted response.
If one manager needs help delegating, sending every manager to a broad leadership program is an expensive way to solve it. If another team’s primary issue is workload, a recognition campaign is unlikely to make much difference. If employees are questioning their career path, the manager may need help having better development conversations rather than another dashboard reminding them that career development scored poorly.
This is where I think employee experience needs to become much more practical. A useful process should tell us what conditions are changing, where the risk is concentrated and which action is most likely to help. Then we need to know whether that action actually worked.
That final step gets surprisingly little attention.
Organizations launch a program and measure participation. Managers complete training. Employees access a resource. An action plan gets marked complete. None of those things tells us whether the underlying problem improved.
We should be measuring whether the action worked
The model we are working toward with Optimo is deliberately circular.
Signals identify emerging risks. The system helps pinpoint where attention is needed and recommends an intervention. Managers receive practical guidance in the flow of their work, and then changes in behaviour and outcomes are measured over time. Those results inform what should happen next.
That sounds obvious when written out; however, in practice, much of HR technology still operates in separate pieces. One system measures employee sentiment, another provides training, and another manages performance. A manager may receive a report telling them something is wrong and then be left to work out what to do with that information.
We should expect more from the connection between insight and action.
If the intervention made no difference, that matters. Maybe we misdiagnosed the problem or the recommended action was wrong. Maybe the manager needs more support, or the issue sits higher in the organization and cannot reasonably be solved at team level.
Learning what did not work is useful too.
Disengagement can be information
An employee withdrawing effort should absolutely get our attention. But I would be careful about treating that behaviour as the thing we need to fix. Sometimes disengagement is telling us something important about the environment around the employee. The manager may be struggling, workloads may have become unreasonable or priorities may no longer be clear. Development may have stalled, or employees may simply have adapted to an organization that keeps asking for more while removing the conditions that made doing good work possible.
If we immediately reach for an engagement initiative, we can miss the message. The better question is much less comfortable:
What is happening here that makes pulling back feel reasonable?
That question puts some responsibility back on the organization, where at least part of it belongs. And if we want engagement to improve, that may be a much more useful place to start.
Need to know where disengagement is really coming from? Engagement scores can show that something is wrong, but leaders need clearer signals to understand where the risk is concentrated and what action is most likely to help. Optimo helps teams connect employee signals to practical manager action, then measure whether the action worked. Book a demo
