Key Takeaways
Engagement is an outcome of the conditions people work within. It is not a lever leaders can pull directly.
Sustainable performance rests on two conditions, Organizational Climate and Experience, and two outcomes, Engagement and Hope.
The same engagement score can hide very different problems. The decision that matters is what to change upstream.
The thermometer tells you something is wrong. It cannot tell you why.
Anyone who has had a fever knows the thermometer is useful. It tells you something is wrong. It may even tell you how serious the problem has become.
What it cannot tell you is why.
Nobody treats a fever by trying to improve the reading on the thermometer. We look further. We ask what is happening underneath it.
Employee engagement should work in much the same way.
Yet in many organizations, the engagement score gradually becomes the objective. The annual survey arrives. Leadership compares the result with last year, with the benchmark and, sometimes, with other business units. Action plans follow. Recognition programs are refreshed. Communication increases. Well-being initiatives appear. Leaders are asked to talk more about culture.
Some of those actions may help. But they can also miss the more important question:
What produced the engagement result in the first place?
The case for engagement itself is well established. Gallup continues to show that only a minority of employees globally are engaged and estimates the productivity consequences of low engagement in the trillions of dollars. Other research has repeatedly connected positive employee experiences with productivity and organizational performance.
So the argument is not that engagement does not matter. It matters enormously. The problem begins when engagement is treated as the explanation rather than the outcome.
People are not simply “made engaged” by an organization. Engagement is part of what they give back in response to what they experience: how they are led, whether they trust decisions, understand the value of their work, can perform effectively, and believe the organization is going somewhere worth following. This is why we believe human performance needs to be looked at more broadly.
Start with the conditions
When performance weakens, organizations naturally look at outcomes. Productivity has fallen. Turnover is increasing. Engagement has moved backwards. Absence is rising. People seem less willing to go beyond the minimum. Those signals matter. But they tell us relatively little about where to intervene.
At VERA, we distinguish between the conditions in which people work and the outcomes those conditions help create.
The conditions are Organizational Climate and Experience.
The outcomes are Engagement and Hope.
That distinction may sound simple, but it changes the conversation. Instead of asking only whether people are engaged, we can begin asking what is happening around them that makes engagement easier or harder to sustain.
Climate
Performance
Organizational Climate what people conclude about the organization
Climate is not what appears in the values statement. It is what people conclude after watching the organization operate. Do leaders explain difficult decisions? Are commitments followed through? Can someone raise a concern without wondering what will happen afterwards? Does the organization behave consistently when pressure increases? These experiences gradually create a shared view of the organization.
We examine that climate through four areas: trust, leadership, meaning and belonging.
Trust is built when employees believe that decisions are made with an understanding of their consequences and that important issues are dealt with openly.
Leadership is experienced through direction, decisions and follow-through — not simply through visibility.
Meaning comes from understanding why the work matters and how an individual’s contribution connects with something larger.
Belonging is reflected in whether people feel respected, included and able to speak without unnecessarily protecting themselves.
These are not abstract cultural ideas. They shape how much energy people are prepared to invest in an organization. Most companies say people are their most important asset. Climate tells us whether employees experience the organization that way.
Trust
Decisions, consequences and openness.
Leadership
Direction, decisions and follow-through.
Meaning
Understanding why the work matters and how individual contribution connects to something larger.
Belonging
Feeling respected, included and able to speak without unnecessarily protecting oneself.
Experience what happens on an ordinary Tuesday
Climate is broad. Experience is much more immediate. It is the manager who gives useful feedback — or does not. It is whether the process helps someone complete a piece of work or makes it unnecessarily difficult. It is whether an employee can see an opportunity to grow, whether good performance is acknowledged, whether communication reaches people before rumours do, and whether workloads remain sustainably manageable.
This is why employee experience cannot be understood from one overall number.
Two parts of the same company can have entirely different realities.
A commercial team may have strong leadership but little confidence in career opportunities. A factory production team may value the organization but struggle with work processes or communication between shifts. A head-office function may report acceptable overall experience while one manager’s team shows a completely different pattern.
The average can hide all three.
There is another complication.
A low score does not automatically mean a high priority. Organizations frequently spend time trying to improve whatever received the lowest survey rating. But employees do not attach equal importance to every aspect of their experience. An area can score poorly and still have relatively little influence on whether people stay, contribute or recommend the organization. Another issue may score only slightly better but matter enormously. That difference should affect where management attention goes.
Measurement becomes more useful when it helps an organization decide where not to spend its energy as well as where to spend it.
Engagement what people are prepared to give back
Once we understand the conditions, engagement becomes much more meaningful. We look at three expressions of it: whether people are willing to recommend, commit and contribute.
The distinction between commitment and contribution is particularly important. They are often treated as if they move together. In organizations, they frequently do not.
Consider two people.
One has no intention of leaving. They are comfortable, relatively satisfied and expect to remain with the organization. But over time they have stopped volunteering ideas, taking initiative or putting additional energy into the job.
Another person is doing exactly the opposite. Performance is strong. They remain highly involved and continue to contribute. But they have started taking calls from recruiters and cannot see themselves staying much longer.
An average engagement score can make those two employees look surprisingly similar.
From a management perspective, they are anything but similar. The first situation raises a contribution question. The second raises a retention question. And each requires a different response.
Hope do people believe there is a way forward?
This is where we, as VERA HR Solutions deliberately go beyond conventional engagement measurement. A person can like their work, respect their manager and remain engaged today while becoming increasingly doubtful about the organization’s future.
We have seen this particularly during periods of restructuring, sustained cost pressure or market uncertainty. Employees may continue doing their jobs well. They may even remain committed to their teams. But underneath that performance, something has changed. They are no longer sure the organization can get where it says it is going.
That is why Hope is part of the VERA Human Performance Index. We use the term in a very practical sense.
Do people believe the organization can achieve what it has set out to achieve?
And when obstacles appear, do they believe the organization can find another route forward?
Hope is therefore not corporate optimism. It is confidence in progress. That distinction matters because willingness to contribute is difficult to sustain indefinitely when people stop believing their effort will lead somewhere.
In many situations, confidence in the future can begin weakening before a traditional engagement score shows significant movement.
The same engagement score can hide very different risks
Separating commitment from contribution allows us to see something that an overall engagement number cannot. Employees with both high commitment and high contribution are strong advocates for the organization. Some employees continue contributing strongly but show weak commitment. They represent a potential flight risk: valuable contribution remains, but the relationship with the organization may be weakening.
Others remain committed but contribute less than they once did. They are not necessarily planning to leave. The question is different: what has reduced their willingness or ability to invest additional effort?
And where both commitment and contribution are weak, the issue is deeper again. The purpose of these segments is not to put labels on individuals. It is to avoid treating very different organizational problems as though they were the same problem.
That distinction has financial consequences as well.
Losing someone who continues to contribute at a high level creates replacement and continuity costs.
Reduced contribution from people who remain in the organization creates a different form of loss — one that is much less visible because no resignation appears and no vacancy is opened.
Both matter. Neither can be understood particularly well from an average engagement score.
From measurement to decision
This brings us back to the thermometer. A useful employee survey should tell an organization something about its people. A useful diagnostic should help the organization decide what to do next.
That means connecting the pieces.
- What are people experiencing?
- Which aspects of that experience matter most?
- What is happening to trust, leadership, meaning and belonging?
- Where are commitment and contribution beginning to separate?
- Do people still believe the organization can achieve what it is asking them to work towards?
- Where is retention risk building?
- Where might lost contribution be creating a productivity cost?
Those are different questions from:
“Did engagement increase by two points?”
And they lead to very different management conversations. The VERA Human Performance Index was designed around that distinction.
It looks at Organizational Climate and Experience as the conditions, and Engagement and Hope as the outcomes. Not because engagement has become less important. Because understanding what creates it has become more important.
The question worth asking
Organizations can spend a great deal of energy trying to move an engagement number. Sometimes the number moves. The more important question is whether anything underneath it has changed. Have employees gained greater trust in leadership? Has work become easier to perform? Do people understand where the organization is going? Are managers creating an environment in which people can contribute? Do employees still believe that their effort can lead to progress? So perhaps the question should no longer be simply:
“How engaged are our people?”
A more useful question is:
“Have we created the conditions in which people choose to invest — and believe that their investment will lead somewhere?”
That is where the engagement conversation ends and the human performance conversation begins.
About the authors
Emre Kavukcuoğlu
is co-founder of VERA HR Solutions. He brings 25 years of experience across HR, organizational design, and people transformation, working at the intersection of business strategy, organization, and performance.
Rinnata Mussina
is co-founder of VERA HR Solutions. She brings more than 10 years of experience across talent, employer branding, and employee development, and has built country-level people systems for more than 1,400 employees.
The VERA Human Performance Index applies the thinking in this article to help organizations see where the conditions for performance are strong, where they break down, and where to act first.