...we discovered that (at least at Cisco) there are two factors of engagement within the Engagement Pulse. The first factor comprises all four “me” items together with the two “we” items that ask about team environment, and so consisted of:

• At work, I clearly understand what is expected of me. (Me)

• I have the chance to use my strengths every day at work. (Me)

• I know I will be recognized for excellent work. (Me)

• In my work, I am always challenged to grow. (Me)

• In my team, I am surrounded by people who share my values. (We)

• My teammates have my back. (We)

We chose to call this factor team engagement. The other factor comprised the remaining two “we” items:

• I am really enthusiastic about the mission of my company. (We)

• I have great confidence in my company’s future. (We)

We chose to call this factor company engagement.

A 2018 Gallup study found that barely a third of US employees were fully engaged in their work—where engagement is defined as being “involved in, enthusiastic about and committed to work.” The majority of employees, 53 percent, were “not engaged,” while 13 percent—the maliciously compliant—were “actively disengaged.” Globally, the situation is even worse, with 15 percent engaged, 67 percent disengaged, and 18 percent actively disengaged.

A former managing partner at McKinsey & Company expressed this view when he advised executives to focus their attention on the “2 percent [of employees] who are really going to drive [results.]” “It’s a very small proportion of people,” he argued, “who drive a lot of value.” When pressed, he admitted his assertion had “no regression analysis or analytics behind it.” It was, in other words, an untested assumption or, to be more accurate, a prejudice.

This sort of disdain for the average employee mirrors the hauteur of eighteenth-century aristocrats—and has the same stifling effect on creativity and initiative. Stunted freedom and upside yield stunted commitment and performance.

Humanyze, an MIT spin off led by Ben Waber, who coined the term people analytics, tags employees and leaders with sensors that capture their movements, communications, and even physiological responses (e.g., stress, excitement, and boredom). Just by analyzing anonymous group-level data, the firm can help organizations identify invisible elements of work relations, such as the hidden power dynamics, in a firm.

For example, in a recent study reported in Harvard Business Review, Waber and his team set out to decode the behavioral differences between men and women in a large multinational firm and explore whether such differences could partly explain the underrepresentation of women in the senior leadership ranks (where they accounted for just 20 percent). The researchers gathered email data, meeting schedule data, and location data for hundreds of employees, across all seniority levels, over four months. Of particular relevance was the data collected with sensors some employees wore. The sensors recorded who talked with whom; where, when, and for how long people communicated with each other; and who dominated each conversation. Waber’s team expected to find behavioral differences between men and women pertaining to people’s drive and networking habits: ‘Perhaps women had fewer mentors, less face time with managers, or weren’t as proactive as men in talking to senior leadership.’ However, the results showed no significant differences between what women and men did at work: ‘Women had the same number of contacts as men, they spent as much time with senior leadership, and they allocated their time similarly to men in the same role. We couldn’t see the types of projects they were working on, but we found that men and women had indistinguishable work patterns in the amount of time they spent online, in concentrated work, and in face-to-face conversation. And in performance evaluations men and women received statistically identical scores. This held true for women at each level of seniority. Yet women weren’t advancing and men were.

Interestingly, one of its core postulates is that the essential sociality of us all, or the universal human impulse to relate to others. In so far as we are relationship-seeking beings, then, what is the connective tissue that actually binds people together, that gives effect to this relational striving? In contrast to the popular belief that knowledge precedes action, I argue that emotions are what prompt and sustain human interactions - and not emotions in the conventional sense, of private feeling states stored inside our heads, each with its own unique biochemical correlate. I regard emotions, instead, as intersubjective phenomena that can be said to exist between people. How else does one explain being moved by a piece of music, a spellbinding movie or a superb novel, if not that some mysterious element - an emotion - has connected to the heart of the composer, the director or the author to the heart of the listener, the watcher or the reader?