How much ‘Employee Engagement’ is too much?

4 March 2025 Reading Time: 4 minutes

by Shaun Randol:

At my previous job I could choose from at least 52 applications (apps) and programs to do my work. On any given week I logged in to 17 of those apps. Every month I used nine more programs. If you add in work-adjacent applications, such as updating my 401(k) or interacting with my health insurance carrier, I regularly used another four apps.

All told I used about 30 programs to get my job done. And I’m not even counting the ad hoc, random disruptions of needing to use programs for one-off tasks, such as updating my password or taking a mandatory training course.

It’s not just me. I reached out to three internal comms colleagues and asked them to tally the number of apps/programs they use regularly for work.

• E, who works at a $250 billion giant, listed 25 apps off the top of her head that she uses to do her job.
• L, who manages internal comms at a tech startup with 1,700 employees, uses 20 apps on any given day.
• And H, who also runs internal comms at a tech startup, uses 23 apps regularly and is actually shopping for another three to add to her repertoire.

“The struggle is real,” H says. “Nobody is accountable for the digital employee experience,” she adds. “It feels like no one cares.”

Your desk-based coworkers are in a similar position. They may need to log in to Salesforce, Jira, a mobile app, accounting software, a candidate tracking program, and 20+ more applications every single week to complete myriad tasks.

Employees are overwhelmed. Too much information comes from too many sources for them to absorb and manage. No news there. Internal comms pros know it through experience, evidence, and simple gut checks.

What might be shocking is to consider that employee comms is part of the problem.

What’s the Problem?

With so many workplace tools in place (and more coming online), it can be difficult to get anything done. Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, says the interruptions coming from all of these tools can be mentally taxing.

• Dr. Mark’s research finds people switch screens an average of 566 times a day. Half the time we’re interrupted; the other half we pull ourselves away. 

Asymmetric tools like email and chat (e.g., Slack, Yammer) are a huge part of the problem because they induce varying levels of anxiety. As Cal Newport writes in A World Without Email:

The flip side of a deep evolutionary obsession with one-on-one interactions, as with most hardwired drives, is a corresponding feeling of distress when it’s thwarted. Much in the same way our attraction to food is coupled with the gnawing sensation of hunger in its absence, our instinct to connect is accompanied by an anxious unease when we neglect these interactions.

As one office worker put it, “There’s this feeling that someone sent this to you and they’re waiting for this response that has a ticker counting down.”

Again, Mr. Newport:

This matters in the office because, as we’ve documented, an unfortunate side effect of the hyperactive hive mind workflow is that it constantly exposes you to exactly this form of distress. This frenetic approach to professional collaborations generates messages faster than you can keep up—you finish one response only to find three more have arrived in the interim—and while you’re at home at night, or over the weekend, or on vacation, you cannot escape the awareness that the missives in your inbox are piling ever thicker in your absence. Not surprisingly, reports of these forms of stress were common in the responses to my reader survey:

• “I have a constant sense of having missed something.”
• “Psychologically, I can’t leave emails unread, no matter how insignificant.”
• “I feel like things are piling up, and then I’m becoming stressed.”
• “My inbox stresses me out because I know how much effort it takes to PROPERLY communicate via email.”

In short, the pings, dings, chirps, chimes, and red-colored notification buttons from too many tools are driving workers nuts.

So why does employee comms ask employees to do even more with these dreaded tools?

Under Pressure

Take a walk around the wilds of internal comms and very soon you’ll trip over a template, program, or strategy to “increase employee engagement.”

• “Employee engagement.” Two words that generate fierce debate about what it actually means.
• (The only two words that get our people more frenzied are “Oxford comma.”)

We can all agree on the basic idea that “employee engagement” means that employees are actively seeking information about the company’s performance and participating in profit-generating and company culture activities. (That’s purposefully vague and high level so I can move on with making my point).

And we all know the benefits of increased employee engagement. Comms pros practically keep a laminated list in their pocket to use whenever someone asks us to justify our role.

• I won’t take up more space by listing the benefits; please check out Poppulo’s Tim Vaughan’s excellent overview of the topic.

But… but…

A key measure of whether a workforce is engaged is how many “engagements” a piece of comms content generates from employees.

• Prime examples include likes, comments, and internal shares.
• Poll participation, feedback, idea generation, views, listens, and social media postings are other engagement metrics.

Employee comms is pressuring employees to engage so that we can generate metrics that make our output seem worthwhile.

Example – Asking Employees to Share on Social Media

Suppose we ask employees to share a piece of content on social media—simple, right? In doing so, we’re asking them to use at least three or four more applications (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram) on top of the 20+ tools they use each day to get work done.

• Sure, platforms like FirstUp might consolidate that process, but that’s still one additional tool they need to learn, log into, and use. But these kinds of platforms also add an extra layer of anxiety—gamification—pressuring employees to stay on top of the leaderboard. (Or become sad, deflated, and demoralized knowing they’ll never top the leaderboard…thus having the opposite of the intended effect: disengage!)
• “As long as we remain committed to a workflow based on constant, ad hoc messaging,” says Mr. Newport, “our Paleolithic brain will remain in a state of low-grade anxiety.”

We’re distracting our coworkers with soft demands to respond to our pings, dings, chirps, chimes, social share buttons, and empty comment fields. We’re increasing their anxiety for the sake of our engagement metrics.

What Is To Be Done?

This isn’t entirely all our fault. It’s a systems issue. Other departments, like IT, HR, Security, and others, must also share some of the blame for fostering a work environment taped together with 30, 40, 50(!) applications.

Employee comms doesn’t have to be part of the problem, though.

• How can we do better?
• Do we get smarter about what we ask employees to do?
• Maybe we change our definition of and metrics around “engagement.”

Or maybe we altogether stop making “engagement” a goal.

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Shaun Randol is the founder and publisher of the Mixternal Comms Playbook. He is a #WeLeadComms honoree.

Written by: Editor