Companies have never had more tools to measure engagement, but employees have never reported feeling more disengaged.
It’s one of the defining paradoxes of modern work: engagement scores are the obsession of many organizations, but loneliness, turnover, and team friction are on the rise. People complete their tasks but do not always experience the relationships that make work sustainable, creative, or truly human. Engagement measures motivation, while connectedness assesses whether people can work together effectively over time.
Many researchers and thinkers have mentioned the forces that will shape the future of work. Jonathan Haidt, in The anxious generationhighlights how today’s workforce arrives with higher baseline anxiety and weaker social muscles, shaped by a smartphone-focused adolescence and a decline in face-to-face interaction. Sociologist Allison Pugh, in The last human workTherefore, that the only irreplaceable work that humans will do in the future is relational, involving empathy, attunement and presence, the distinctively human capabilities that AI cannot replicate.
Given all this, why do organizations continue to rely so heavily on engagement surveys, tools that were created decades ago for a radically different world of work? Because historically commitment has been a useful signal. However, in the current context, it is insufficient. Engagement indicates whether people are motivated, while connection indicates whether people can thrive.
When the compromise worked and why it doesn’t work anymore
There’s a reason engagement became the gold standard of workplace metrics. According to Kevin Kruse, serial entrepreneur and best-selling author, engagement reflects the emotional commitment employees feel toward their organization—the psychological spark behind discretionary effort. Engaged employees typically deliver higher productivity, better customer service, and greater alignment with the company’s purpose. For years, engagement surveys have helped leaders understand motivation at scale. In the industrial workplaces for which they were designed, engagement was a reasonable indicator of performance.
But motivation is no longer the main obstacle. The bottleneck is relational capacity: the ability of people to work together, deal with conflict, build trust, and collaborate despite distance and differences. Today, an employee can be committed to their tasks and at the same time feel deeply disconnected from their team. They may care about the mission while feeling invisible in meetings. They can exceed their goals without having anyone at work they can trust.
High commitment can be based on fragile relational foundations. In hybrid and distributed work, this is often the case. Engagement indicates whether people are enthusiastic, while connection indicates whether an organization is healthy.
Why commitment no longer matches the moment
The central challenge leaders face is not effort, but isolation. The U.S. Surgeon General’s Notice 2023 called loneliness a “public health epidemic” and noted that the workplace is one of the top places where adults seek connection. Hybrid work has weakened casual social bonds, while digital communication has reduced emotional nuances. Younger workers, raised in online ecosystems, often arrive with less experience in conflict resolution, spontaneous dialogue, and relational risk-taking, all central ingredients of high-functioning teams. Employees may be engaged but not be able to speak candidly, trust their teammates, overcome differences, ask for help, or integrate into a cohesive whole.
As workplace culture expert and best-selling author Moe often says, “People thrive when they feel seen, not just surveyed.” Participation surveys were not designed to measure visibility, but to measure satisfaction, and satisfaction does not predict resilience.
What Connectivity Really 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 trust to do their jobs.”
Connectedness captures dimensions that engagement simply does not capture:
1. Relational trust. Do people believe their colleagues have their back? Trust is a well-established predictor of team performance and psychological courage.
2. Belonging. A sense of belonging reduces the risk of turnover, buffers stress and improves collaboration. Deloitte reports that 79% of employees surveyed said fostering belonging was important to organizational success, and 93% agreed that belonging drives organizational performance.
3. Psychological courage. Can employees disagree productively? Tell the truth? Take interpersonal risks? Courage is what fuels innovation and healthy conflict.
4. Purpose and meaning. Clarity of purpose is not a strategic artifact, it is a relational glue. Help employees understand not only what they do but also why they are important.
5. Network strength and collaboration flow. This reflects how well people work together in teams, not just how they feel about the organization in the abstract.
6. Feel seen. Employees do not require perfection, but they do require recognition of their humanity: their history, their needs, their contributions.
Allison Pugh’s research underscores this point: These relational dimensions are precisely the aspects of work that machines cannot automate. “The irreplaceable human contribution,” he writes, “is connection itself.”
Connectedness predicts performance better than engagement
Why is connectivity more predictive than engagement? Research in organizational psychology, sociology, and network science consistently shows that connected teams:
- Innovate more easily
- Recover from setbacks faster
- Handle conflict with less damage
- Run complex jobs with fewer delays
- Experience reduced burnout and turnover
Google’s Project Aristotle found that psychological safety, a relational variable, was the leading predictor of team effectiveness, outperforming 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 resilience of execution. Engagement drives effort, while connection drives performance.
How leaders can start measuring connectivity today
This is where leaders often ask, “Okay, but how do we measure something as intangible as connectivity?” Here is a practical primer on our combined work:
1. Quarterly Connection Pulses. Short, frequent surveys with questions like: Do you feel connected to the people you work closely with? Do you have someone at work you can be honest with? Does collaboration between teams feel reliable and secure?
2. Mapping relationship networks. Organizational network analysis, a method for mapping networks in organizations, can identify bottlenecks, isolated individuals, and overloaded “superconnectors.”
3. Leader relational credibility index. A relational 360º: Do people feel seen, supported, safe, challenged and understood by their leaders?
4. Collaboration friction score. Identify where trust is breaking down across functions, even when engagement is high.
5. Belonging gaps. Identify enthusiastic but invisible people, the group most vulnerable to burnout and turnover.
6. Monthly meetings. Replace or refine annual performance reviews with regular, meaningful two-way dialogue between the people leader and employee.
These tools move leaders from looking at scores to looking at stories, the relational realities lived within their teams. To build connected organizations, leaders must move from driving engagement to designing relational ecosystems and motivating people to strengthen networks.
In Tony’s work on designing relational leadership experiences, we call this creating Connection Campfires: intentional spaces where people can speak boldly, listen deeply, and reconnect with the purpose behind their work. In Moe’s research, this is the heart habit of leadership: presenting yourself with curiosity, presence and harmony so that people feel truly seen. In a world where isolation increases and trust erodes, connectivity is a strategic capability and it is time for leaders to start measuring what matters most.