We’ve confused “sentiment” with “engagement” – and it’s costing us

Mike Klein:

Last week I posted on LinkedIn about my Two-Question Survey approach and said we should stop measuring “engagement” and start measuring alignment. It touched a nerve.

The pushback was immediate. Several sharp practitioners made the same point in different words: we need both. Alignment matters, yes, but so does how people feel.

They were right to push back. And sitting with their objections, I realized something: the problem wasn’t just with “engagement” as a concept. It was that I had conflated two things that are genuinely distinct – and so has most of the industry.

“Sentiment” and “employee engagement” are not the same thing. They were never the same thing.

But the conflation did something more damaging than muddle two terms.

From the early 2000s, the push to measure and improve “employee engagement” made sentiment measurement feel like the complete picture – the whole job done. We were not measuring sentiment as one useful input among several. Employee engagement surveys were measuring sentiment exclusively, and users were treating alignment as something that could be inferred from it. Leaders looked at rising engagement scores and concluded people must be aligned.

More recently the use of the term “engagement” compounded the problem by quietly absorbing a second meaning at the same time.

In much of the communication world, “engagement” refers not to sentiment at all but to content consumption – opens, clicks, shares, event attendance, intranet views. Platform analytics, not attitudinal data, wearing the same label. 

The Future of Work Index I co-produced with LumApps last year found this definitional chaos in plain sight: when business leaders and communication leaders were asked to define “employee engagement,” the answers ranged from emotional commitment and discretionary effort to cultural interactivity – and content consumption. 

Even among practitioners who agreed engagement was a priority, there was a startling lack of alignment on what the term actually meant. One word. Multiple incompatible meanings. Zero shared basis for measurement.

The result: a term that simultaneously means how people feel about the organization, how committed they are to it, and whether they clicked a link – and an industry that has spent decades treating all three as equivalent signals of organizational health.

Sentiment is how people feel – about their work, their manager, their organization. It is real, measurable, and it matters.

“Employee engagement,” in contrast, is a performance claim with a pressure mechanism attached. Improve the scores – on managerial recognition, institutional trustworthiness, best-friend-at-work status, communication quality – and productivity and profitability will follow. That is the promise sold to organizations. And it’s been the rod used to beat internal communicators, HR teams, and managers who fail to move the needle.

Somewhere in the last two decades of survey design, vendor pitching, HR benchmarking, and relentless pressure to show massive improvements in “engagement” scores on the back of microscopic investments, sentiment measurement got conscripted into making a performance claim it was never designed to support. Nearly all employee research collapsed into a single lane where sentiment was seen as the primary driver of performance, to the exclusion of alignment – ensuring whether people actually understand what they are supposed to do and whether they are doing it.

So, what to do?

At a bare minimum, we need to stop calling sentiment measurement “engagement.” The conflation is doing real damage. 

We can also bring alignment into the conversation.

Start with the Two-Question Survey. 

Ask people: what are the top three priorities facing your organization? 

Then ask: what are the three most important things you are focusing on in your job? 

You don’t need to ask everyone. Ask 20 percent. If you can’t ask 20 percent, ask twenty people. Demonstrate that the alignment leaders assume is not as solid as they think.

And here is the punch: alignment data surfaces sentiment too – without asking for it. The way people talk about transformation programs, organizational inconsistencies, or the hygiene factors that crowd out strategic intent tells you a great deal about how they feel. The confidence or hesitation, the ownership or detachment in how someone names a priority – that is sentiment data, embedded in alignment data.

You cannot get alignment data from sentiment measurement. But you can get sentiment insight from alignment measurement. One instrument. Two answers. And for the first time, the one that matters to your board is in the room.

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Want to measure what matters?  Then let’s have a conversation.  Book a conversation with Mike at http://changingtheterms.youcanbook.me

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Mike Klein is a communication consultant specializing in research and strategy with extensive experience in internal communication. He is Editor-in-Chief of Strategic, and is an IABC Fellow.