“You can have high engagement scores while people have a lousy experience. The two are not the same thing.”
— David Cohen
Imagine receiving great news: your company’s employee engagement score just hit an all-time high. Celebrations ensue. Leadership breathes a collective sigh of relief. And yet — the quiet departures continue. Burnout is up. Trust is quietly eroding. Something isn’t adding up.
This scenario is playing out in organizations around the world. And according to organizational consultant and researcher David Cohen, the reason is simpler — and more fixable — than most leaders think. We’ve been measuring the wrong thing.
Engagement vs. Experience: Why the Distinction Matters
For decades, organizations have relied on employee engagement surveys to gauge the health of their workforce. But engagement — defined largely as discretionary effort, positive relationships at work, and general satisfaction — only captures a slice of what’s actually going on.
Employee experience, by contrast, is everything. It encompasses whether people feel aligned with organizational values, whether leaders make decisions that are consistent with those values, whether they have the resources to do their jobs well, and whether they feel genuinely respected and trusted over time.
Think of the difference this way: engagement is a snapshot. Experience is the full film. A snapshot taken on a good day can look great — and completely miss the story that’s been unfolding all along.
Research from Gallup and other organizational behavior institutions has long pointed to a gap between what surveys capture and what employees actually feel. Cohen’s work adds an important layer: that gap often widens precisely because organizations are trying to game it.
The Survey Problem — and Why It Persists
Why do companies keep obsessing over engagement surveys if the scores can be misleading? Cohen points to a culture of rankings — the prestige of being named a ‘best place to work’ — combined with a very human tendency to chase validation over understanding.
“Unless you’re going to do something about it, why do it?”
Cohen describes working with a unionized production facility that saw engagement scores drop dramatically from the 70s to the 40s. The instinct was to diagnose a serious engagement problem. What he actually found: the employees deliberately gave low scores as a negotiation tactic — and would have turned down a higher-paying job elsewhere because they loved their work and took immense pride in their product. Their experience was excellent. Their survey score didn’t reflect it.
In another case, an entire team gave a manager artificially high scores after being implicitly pressured — then all quit on the same day the survey results were released. High score. Total disengagement. The score told leadership exactly nothing useful.
The psychological research on survey response behavior supports this pattern. When employees don’t trust that their responses are anonymous, when they’ve seen past feedback go unaddressed, or when there’s implicit or explicit pressure to respond positively, survey validity collapses. Organizations end up measuring compliance, not experience.
The Experience Pyramid: A Framework for What Actually Drives Performance
So if engagement surveys aren’t the answer, what should leaders be looking at? Cohen describes a layered pyramid that maps the real drivers of employee experience from foundation to peak:
- Stability. Stability — the foundation. Basic income security, physical safety, and baseline working conditions. Parties and perks live here. They’re necessary but not sufficient.
- Resources & Capability. Resources & Capability — having the tools, training, and time to do one’s job well and feel successful at it.
- Recognition & Growth. Recognition & Growth — not being rewarded for expected performance, but being genuinely recognized for going above and beyond, and being given real opportunities to grow. This is where many organizations stop — and where the Great Resignation found its footing.
- Belonging & Connection. Belonging & Connection — feeling that the organization’s purpose is meaningful, that the culture is inclusive, and that your work contributes to something larger than the task in front of you.
- Trust & Respect. Trust & Respect — the apex. When leaders consistently make decisions aligned with stated values, even under pressure, even when it’s inconvenient, they build the kind of trust that creates genuinely loyal, resilient teams.
This framework mirrors well-established psychological research, from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to self-determination theory, which identifies autonomy, competence, and relatedness as the core drivers of intrinsic motivation. What Cohen adds is a specific application to the organizational context — and a clear argument that leaders need to be actively building toward the top of this pyramid, not just maintaining the bottom.
It’s a Leadership Problem — Not an HR Problem
One of the most important and often overlooked insights from this framework: employee experience is not HR’s responsibility. It is leadership’s.
HR creates policies, processes, and guidelines. But whether those guidelines translate into actual experience — whether an employee feels supported by their manager, whether they have autonomy, whether they trust that decisions made at the top align with the values on the wall — is entirely a function of leadership behavior.
“CEOs manage machinery very well. They know when to recalibrate. But they sometimes treat people with less care than they treat machines.”
Research consistently shows that the direct manager relationship is one of the most powerful predictors of employee wellbeing, retention, and engagement. A study often cited in organizational psychology research found that people don’t leave companies — they leave managers. What Cohen adds is that it goes both ways: senior leadership’s decisions, especially during difficult periods, are the ultimate test of whether trust has been built or is simply being borrowed.
When leaders publicly espouse values and then abandon them at the first sign of pressure — restructuring without explanation, rolling back flexibility, making unilateral decisions that contradict stated principles — they don’t just break trust. They destroy the entire experience architecture that’s been built beneath it.
Burnout Is About Disconnection, Not Just Workload
Burnout is widely framed as a workload issue — too much to do, too little time. But Cohen’s research points to something deeper: it is fundamentally a disconnection problem.
He describes working with an oil company that reorganized to become leaner, expanding managerial spans of responsibility. The immediate casualty wasn’t productivity — it was the informal human infrastructure that had quietly been holding everything together. The morning coffee conversations. The hallway check-ins. The casual way colleagues used to pace their days together.
As those disappeared, so did resilience. People found themselves doing more, with less support, and less sense of meaning. The work hadn’t changed. The human connection around the work had.
This is consistent with research from the field of occupational health psychology. Burnout — as defined in Christina Maslach’s foundational work — is characterized not just by exhaustion but by cynicism and a diminished sense of personal efficacy. Both are symptoms of disconnection: from purpose, from colleagues, from a sense that effort is meaningful.
The AI Inflection Point: A New Threat to Human Connection at Work
There is a new force reshaping employee experience in ways organizations are only beginning to grapple with: artificial intelligence.
Cohen describes watching colleagues give their AI tools names, build daily reliance on them for everything from presentation design to career advice, and gradually reduce their interaction with fellow humans at work. The concern isn’t productivity — AI genuinely expands capability. The concern is what evaporates in the process.
“If there’s no human connection, there’s no loyalty and no commitment — because I could do this work for anyone, anywhere.”
When employees used to work through a problem with a colleague, there was intellectual friction — ideas challenged, assumptions tested, perspectives broadened. That friction is a feature, not a bug. It is how trust builds. It is how people feel genuinely seen and valued in a workplace. When that friction disappears into a chatbot conversation, something essential goes with it.
Cohen’s prescription is deliberate: leaders need to build structural guardrails around AI use — not to limit capability, but to protect connection. That means designing workflows where human conversation is required before decisions are made, where collaboration happens between people and not just between a person and a tool, and where critical thinking is actively exercised rather than outsourced.
Universities are already raising alarms about the erosion of critical thinking in AI-native students. Workplaces face the same risk. The antidote, in both contexts, is the same: intentional, structured human-to-human engagement.
What High-Performing Organizations Do Differently
Cohen summarizes the distinguishing characteristics of organizations with genuinely strong employee experience in five dimensions — a practical framework for any leader asking where to begin:
- Belonging. Belonging — Do people feel their values are aligned with the organization’s? Are they part of a team that is working toward something larger than the individual task?
- Purpose. Purpose — Do people understand the connection between what they do and the outcome it creates? Do they feel like contributors, not cogs?
- Achievement & Recognition. Achievement & Recognition — Are people recognized in ways that are meaningful to them personally — intrinsic, specific, and connected to real contribution?
- Happiness. Happiness — Do people have the time, space, and energy to do their work well? Are they being asked to do more with less indefinitely, or is their capacity genuinely respected?
- Vigor. Vigor — Is there positive energy in the organization? Not manufactured enthusiasm, but genuine forward momentum — a feeling that the work matters and the environment supports doing it well?
An additional insight worth noting: one of the fastest and most overlooked ways to strengthen employee experience is to look inward before looking outward. Organizations that consistently hire from outside for senior and mid-level roles quietly signal to their people that they have no future here. Building internal succession pathways is not just good talent strategy — it is an act of trust that ripples through the entire experience architecture.
A Reflection for Leaders: Where Do You Start?
If this resonates — if you’ve been watching engagement scores while something quieter and more important was happening beneath them — here is a simple reframe to begin with:
Ask yourself: Are we measuring how people feel in a moment, or how they experience working here over time?
Start with the pyramid. Identify honestly where your organization sits. Is stability assured? Are people resourced? Are they growing — not just performing? Do they belong? And at the top: do they trust you?
Listen differently. Not through surveys alone, but through focus groups, ongoing conversations, and the small signals that don’t show up in a score: who’s going quiet, who stopped offering ideas, who’s present in body but absent in spirit.
And finally: lead your values consistently — especially when it costs something to do so. That is what the top of the pyramid is built on. Everything else follows.
Employee engagement is not something you manufacture through perks, parties, or pressure. It is something people give freely — when the experience around them creates the conditions for trust, meaning, growth, and genuine human connection.
That is a leadership challenge. And it is, in the best possible sense, entirely within your control.
