From Engagement to Energy. It's Time to Measure What Actually Matters

For the last twenty years, the question driving people strategy in most organizations has been some version of this:

Are your employees engaged?

It seemed rigorous. It produced dashboards, quarterly reports, action plans, benchmarks, and entire consulting practices. HR teams built programs around it. Leaders reviewed the scores. Organizations made decisions based on whether the number went up, down, or sideways.

And yet here we are.

Burnout at record levels, global engagement has fallen for only the second time in twelve years. And a lot of leaders I speak to are quietly wondering why so many of the interventions are not actually working.

I’ve been sitting with this for a while.

And I’ve come to think the problem is not that we are measuring engagement badly.

It is that engagement was never the right thing to measure in the first place.

It is a proxy.

A symptom we decided to treat as a cause.

The better question is not:

How engaged are our people?

It is:

Where is human energy being created in this organization, and where is it being destroyed?

That question leads somewhere very different.

Engagement Measures the Output, Not the Source

Engagement tells you what is visible from the outside.

Are people showing up? Are they committed? Would they recommend working here? Do they intend to stay?

Those are not useless things to know.

But they do not tell you where people’s energy comes from. They do not explain why it disappears. And they do not show you how to restore it once it is gone.

That is the part that actually matters.

I’ve sat with teams that scored fine on engagement surveys and were quietly running on empty. People hitting their numbers. Saying the right things on pulse checks. Burning out in slow motion. The survey didn’t catch it, because it wasn’t built to look that deep. It was built to measure the output of energy, not the source of it.

That distinction sounds subtle. It isn’t.

Treating burnout as an engagement problem is like treating a fever as a temperature problem. You can keep measuring the temperature. You can even bring it down temporarily. But if you’re not asking what’s causing it, you’re just managing the symptom.

The Data Is Pointing to Something Deeper

Here is what the current picture looks like.

Gallup’s 2025 State of the Global Workplace report put global engagement at 21%, down from 23% the year before. It was only the second decline in twelve years. The estimated cost: $438 billion in lost productivity.

SHRM’s 2024 mental health research found that 44% of employees feel burned out, 45% feel emotionally drained, and 51% feel “used up” by the end of the workday.

A Harvard Business Review study from the same year found that more than 53% of managers reported burnout symptoms.

These are not isolated findings. They are a pattern.

And the pattern is not simply that “people are not engaged enough”. The pattern is that something is consuming human energy faster than organizations are restoring it.

That is an energy problem.

And energy problems require different solutions than engagement problems.

So what does an energy lens actually look like?

The psychological foundation isn’t complicated, even if the organizational change required to act on it is.

Self-Determination Theory, which has been building its evidence base for decades, argues that people are most motivated and healthiest when three things are present: meaningful autonomy, a genuine sense of competence, and real connection to people and purpose.

Not perks. Not performative flexibility. The actual experience of choosing, mattering, and belonging.

When those three things are present, people don’t just perform. They sustain. They recover. They bring something that wasn’t there before.

When they’re absent, performance can continue for a while, but people are drawing from reserves rather than generating anything new. And eventually, the reserves run out.

But here’s where I think the traditional framework stops short. And where our own research at Claro pushes the conversation further.

SDT gives you the right categories. What it doesn’t give you is resolution. Saying someone needs “autonomy and connection” to thrive is a bit like saying someone needs “food and rest” to stay healthy.

True. Not very actionable. Because the person sitting across from you in a performance conversation isn’t a category. They’re a specific human being with a specific motivational profile that looks nothing like the person next to them.

In our research at Claro, we mapped 30 distinct motivational drivers: the granular sources from which people generate energy at work. What we consistently find is that each person has a unique combination of roughly five dominant drivers that define how they naturally operate and where they come alive.

The practical implication is something most organizations completely miss: people can be doing the same work, hitting the same targets, sitting in the same team meeting, and experiencing completely different internal realities depending on whether their core drivers are being activated or suppressed.

Take three drivers that all produce results: problem solving, rescuing, and influence. From the outside, someone driven by problem solving and someone driven by rescuing can look identical. Both step in when things go wrong, both are reliable under pressure, both get things done. But the problem solver is energized by the intellectual challenge of figuring out what’s broken. The rescuer is energized by the human need: someone is stuck, and they can help. The influencer is energized by shifting how people think and moving others toward a different direction.

Put the problem solver in a role with no real complexity and they quietly disengage. Put the rescuer in a role with no human contact and they dry up. Put the influencer in a role where their voice doesn’t move anything and they stop bringing it.

Same job title. Completely different energy equation.

The same granularity applies to what we call “people powers”: drivers oriented toward human connection. Connecting, collaborating, and developing others all look like interpersonal strengths from the outside. But the person driven by connecting wants depth and genuine relationship. The collaborator is energized by building something together that neither person could build alone. The developer is energized specifically by watching someone grow. They need to see the before and after.

Put a developer in a team of already-high performers with no visible growth edges, and their most fundamental driver has nowhere to go. They’ll stay. They might even look engaged. But something essential is being left unused.

This is what the engagement survey misses entirely, and what even SDT, as powerful as it is, doesn’t fully capture: the specificity of what each person needs in order to actually generate energy rather than just manage its absence.

A 2023 systematic review published in Sustainability, which examined 86 peer-reviewed studies on human energy in organizational settings, called what we’re experiencing “a global human energy crisis” driven by accelerated change, digital overload, and the erosion of recovery time. That’s a strong phrase. I think it’s accurate. But the crisis isn’t just about volume or pace. It’s about precision. We’re managing people at the category level when the real information is at the individual level.

Well-Being Is Not Separate From Performance

For many years, organizations treated well-being as a benefit, a program, or a human resources initiative separate from business performance. The evidence now argues firmly against that separation.

The 2024 CIPD Evidence Review on Psychological Safety, which examined and synthesized research through 2023, found that psychological safety consistently enables people to ask critical questions, report mistakes, raise concerns, and offer suggestions without fear of negative consequences. Teams that feel psychologically safe learn faster, innovate more reliably, and sustain performance under pressure. In uncertain environments, the review found, the performance effect of psychological safety grows larger, not smaller. This matters because uncertainty is now a permanent feature of organizational life.

Amy Edmondson, whose research grounds the psychological safety literature, argued in her 2023 book Right Kind of Wrong that the organizations best equipped for the current era are those that have learned to treat mistakes as information and to create conditions where honest contribution is the norm, not the exception. That capacity is an energy multiplier.

Energy management is not about making work easy. It is about making work meaningful enough to be worth the effort, and safe enough to sustain it.

From Skills to the Human Operating System

The current conversation about work is dominated by skills: reskilling, upskilling, future skills, digital skills, AI skills. This conversation is important, but incomplete.

Skills are tools. Energy is the operating system.

A person may have the right skills but no desire to use them. A team may have the right capabilities but no trust. An organization may have advanced technology but no imagination.

The deeper differentiator is what might be called the human operating system: the internal architecture that determines how people interpret reality, make decisions, relate to others, create meaning, and move through uncertainty. This includes motivation, emotional intelligence, curiosity, ethical judgment, creativity, adaptability, purpose, intuition, and relational intelligence.

These are not “soft skills.” They are core human infrastructure.

McKinsey’s 2025 research on the future of work found that 76% of employees now use AI in some capacity, up from 30% in 2023. As AI absorbs more routine and procedural tasks, the value of purely procedural knowledge declines. The premium shifts toward the human capacities that help people ask better questions, frame problems, build trust, and make meaning in ambiguous environments.

This is also why the traditional job role is becoming less stable.

Tasks shift faster than job descriptions. Teams form and dissolve around problems. Human contribution becomes more fluid.

In this world, organizations need to understand people at a level deeper than title, department, or skill set. They need to know: what gives this person energy? What kind of problems do they naturally move toward? Where do they show unusual curiosity? What conditions help them do their best work? What human qualities do others rely on them for?

This is a new form of talent intelligence, not a skills map alone, but an energy architecture. The strategic question for HR is therefore changing from “what skills do we need?” to “what human energies do we need to activate, protect, and direct?”

The AI Paradox: Automation Can Drain People or Liberate Them

The AI layer makes all of this more complicated, and more urgent.

There’s a finding in McKinsey’s 2025 research that I keep coming back to: the heaviest AI users at work report both the highest engagement and the highest intent to quit. The same tools that energize people are, in the wrong context, accelerating depletion. One study found that heavy AI use can make people lonelier and less healthy, particularly when it replaces human interaction and increases monitoring.

We’re automating tasks without asking what we’re doing to the people who remain. That’s a design failure, not a technology problem.

The question most organizations are asking about AI is:

Did this tool save time?

That’s a reasonable question. But it’s not sufficient.

The better questions are:

Did it remove the work that drains people and free them for the work that actually requires them? Did it create more space for judgment, connection, creativity? Or did it just raise the ceiling on how much can be extracted before someone breaks?

Most organizations, from what I can see, are at what researchers describe as “level one” of AI integration: eliminating pain points, improving basic satisfaction. The competitive advantage is at level three, using AI to redesign work around human flourishing. Almost no one is there yet.

Organizational Energy as a Business Advantage, and a Leadership Responsibility

None of this means engagement measurement is worthless. It isn’t. But it’s the output, not the input.

The input is whether people’s work connects to something they find genuinely meaningful. Whether they have real autonomy, not just the appearance of it. Whether their manager has built conditions where honest contribution is possible, or conditions where people perform safety rather than feeling it.

McKinsey’s organizational health research, drawn from more than 2,500 companies over a decade, found that the organizations in the top quartile of health outperform the bottom quartile by nearly three times on shareholder return over ten years.

That’s not a wellness finding. That’s a performance finding. The two are not separate.

And if energy is the resource, then leadership is the design function. The manager who understands what drives each person on their team, and structures work accordingly, isn’t doing something soft. They’re doing something precise. They’re converting human potential into sustainable output instead of burning through it.

The Hard Part

Here’s what I think is actually hard about this shift.

Taking energy seriously means changing things that are genuinely difficult to change: how managers are trained to have conversations, how roles are designed, how we evaluate what AI adoption does to people over time, how recovery is treated as a business condition rather than a personal responsibility. It means asking harder questions than “what’s our engagement score this quarter?”

Most organizations aren’t ready to do that. Not because the leaders don’t care, but because the system isn’t set up to surface those questions or reward the people who ask them.

But that’s exactly where the leverage is. The organizations that learn to treat human energy as a strategic resource, not a wellness metric, not an HR initiative, but an actual operating condition, will have something that can’t be replicated by headcount or technology alone.

A workforce that generates energy rather than just consuming it moves differently. It adapts faster, recovers better, and produces the kind of output that doesn’t show up on a skills matrix.

The question I’d suggest bringing to your next leadership conversation isn’t: how engaged are our people?

It’s:

where is human energy being created in this organization, and where is it being destroyed?

Those are different questions. They produce different conversations. And eventually, they produce different organizations.

I’m curious where you’re seeing this play out in your own context. What’s draining energy in your organization right now that has nothing to do with workload? I’d genuinely like to know.

Want to see what drives your people? Schedule a talk with Claro Mentor.

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