How can we nail employee experience if we can’t even define employee engagement?

5 June 2025 Reading Time: 4 minutes

By Mike Klein:

Even as organizations grapple with the challenges of AI and the potential for sweeping changes in organizational ranks, there remains a lot of continued emphasis on “employee experience” and continuing a decades-long trend, in “employee engagement”.  

Deploying technology that enables greater agility and integration is of course critical to improving employee experience – but there’s also an underlying problem that also needs to be addressed – the misalignment, and even the contradiction, of the prevailing definitions of employee engagement, misalignments that have the potential to crack the foundation of any effort to improve employee experience.  

There’s been a lot of research on “employee engagement” over the years – but one question that hasn’t been frequently asked is “how do you define ‘employee engagement’”? 

So, in my research as part of LumApps Future of Work Index, we made a point of asking the question – and it should be enough to give a fair amount of pause.

It is not simply that we collected about 150 different takes on the subject, from business leaders, managers and communication leaders.  It’s that these takes cooked down to nine distinct categories – some of which are tangential to each other, and some largely oppositional.

Alignment

The extent to which employees are pursuing common organizational goals

Communication content and platform use

The extent to which employees consume company content and use company communication platforms

Cultural interactivity

The extent to which business culture involves employees in decisions and collects and responds to their feedback

Discretionary effort

The extent to which employees are willing to do more than they are paid to do

Emotional commitment

The extent to which employees care about their organizations

Job satisfaction

The extent to which employees like and embrace their own specific roles

Recognition

The willingness of the organization to celebrate the accomplishments and commitment of its employees

Teamwork

The extent to which employees are inclined to collaborate with each other

Work participation/Compliance

The seamlessness to which employees perform their expected job roles

Conflict rather than consensus

In our research, there was a clear “winner” in both the “overall business” and “communication leader” groups – and that was “emotional commitment”, a result that tracks with a lot of the current conversation which claims there is a consensus view that “employee engagement” means the “emotional commitment” of employees.

But “emotional commitment” was far from a runaway winner, with only 39% of “overall business respondents” leaning towards that definition and a mere 34% of “communication leaders” lining up with that take.

The second place winner in both groups was “cultural interactivity” – which is driven far more by the employer’s willingness to meaningfully involve employees and respond to employee input.  29% percent of communication leaders chose cultural interactivity as their definition, while 17% of overall business respondents so chose.

This is a clear conflict with both strategic and tactical implications – particularly for organizations that are averse to meaningful involvement of employees in driving their organizations’ decisions or even their cultural environments, and tend to see “employee engagement” as a one-way exercise to improve employee attitudes.”

The view that employee engagement is a one-way bet becomes more evident with the third place winner in both groups, “discretionary effort” – the willingness of employees to do “more than the minimum”, or, indeed, more than they’re explicitly paid to do.  

In the early years of the “employee engagement” movement, the idea was indeed sold as a way for organizations to drive additional productivity without concomitant expenditures on wages and benefits.

That view persists among 17% of the participating communication leaders and 12% from the “overall business participants.”

Is “discretionary effort” the same thing as “emotional commitment”?

No, a view that’s grounded in previous research and writing in this space.  Indeed, David Macleod, one of the promoters of the employee engagement concept at the turn of this century, coined a phrase: “headless chickens” to describe a whole segment of highly engaged but unaligned and unproductive employees. 

Is “content engagement” the same as employee engagement?

Again, no.  Although it’s been common among internal communication platforms to refer to the extent to which employees are using their tools to access information as “employee engagement”, this definition pulled single-digit responses from both communication leaders and respondents from elsewhere in the business (7% and 9%). 

This is not to say that modern communication tools don’t contribute positively to employee engagement as it’s defined in other ways.  Indeed, the use of modern communication tools greatly facilitates cultural interactivity by providing platforms for two-way and multidirectional conversations between leaders, managers and staff, and increasingly, have the ability to accelerate the collection, interpretation, and integration of employee viewpoints into organizational actions.  But content engagement alone is not seen as a mainstream employee engagement definition.

Implications for “employee experience.”

The clear lack of alignment between broadly held definitions of employee engagement dovetail with the Index’s findings about attitudes covering the implementation of “employee experience” initiatives in their organizations. In response to the question, “how would you rate your organization’s overall level of collaboration between HR, Internal Communications and IT teams to create a satisfactory employee experience?”

A clear majority of communication leaders and other business respondents characterized their organizations’ collaboration levels as “siloed or dysfunctional” (57% vs 55%).  

Not only do those figures address the general level of interdepartmental cooperation – the very definition of what is “satisfactory” comes into play – and that’s where the employee engagement definitions come in. Is the employee experience only satisfactory when the organization is sufficiently responsive to employees, or if it produces higher productivity through unpaid “discretionary effort.”

Indeed, an effort to create a common, aligned definition of employee engagement in an organization needs to be aligned with efforts to bring in the right kind of technology that breaks down silos and drives greater organizational integration and agility.

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Mike Klein is Editor-In-Chief of Strategic and partnered with LumApps in designing and conducting the Future of Work Index.  He is an active communication consultant and a longtime critic of the continuing emphasis on “employee engagement.”

Written by: Editor