Employee engagement was built for a more stable era

A planning cycle. A strategy cycle. A reorg every few years. A new tool rollout that people had time to absorb. A period of change, followed by a period of stability. That version of work is gone. Today, work moves through constant disruption and AI is rewriting jobs in real time. Economic uncertainty is keeping employees on edge. Workplace norms are being renegotiated. And employees are asking harder questions about what work should provide beyond a paycheck. This is the new operating environment. Yet many engagement strategies were built for a steadier one. Those strategies assume employees have enough capacity to answer another survey, adopt another tool, attend another training, or make better use of existing benefits. That assumption deserves a closer look. THE GROUND HAS SHIFTED UNDER EVERYONE AI is changing how value is created and work is assigned. It’s also changing how people understand their own relevance. The World Economic Forum estimated that 44 of workers’ core skills will change by 2027. For employees, there is pressure to learn the new tools, but they also ask: Where do I fit now? Which skills still matter? Am I being augmented, evaluated, and will eventually be replaced? At the same time, the broader stress load is rising. The American Psychological Association reported in 2023 that 77 of U.S. workers experienced work-related stress in the past month. Gallup found that global employee engagement fell to 21 in 2024, with an estimated 438 billion in lost productivity. And that is only what is happening at work. Outside of work, pressure keeps building. According to AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving, 63 million Americans, about one in four adults, are unpaid caregivers. The CDC reports that three in four American adults have at least one chronic health condition. The Federal Reserve found that 37 of adults could not cover a 400 emergency expense exclusively with cash or its equivalent. Caregiving. Medical complexity. Financial strain. Childcare gaps. Elder care. Insurance issues. Debt. Grief. The bureaucratic drag of modern life. None of this disappears when someone opens a laptop or walks into a meeting. It comes to work with them, affecting focus, energy, creativity, patience, decision-making, and follow-through. A DIFFERENT WAY TO READ ENGAGEMENT This is where many companies are misreading the moment. Capacity is the root issue now. Employees are running out of bandwidth to fully show up for work. Most engagement strategies still rely on familiar tools: surveys, dashboards, recognition programs, manager training, benefits refreshes, wellness content. Those tools may have value, but they are not enough. A meditation app cannot solve a denied medical claim. A webinar cannot help someone find backup care for a parent. A benefits portal cannot remove the burden of figuring out which resource applies, whether it is any good, and what to do next. Real life does not arrive in neat categories. A caregiving issue can become a financial issue. A health issue can become a scheduling issue. A housing issue can become a productivity issue. These problems cut across domains, and they require coordination and follow-through. A FUNDAMENTAL SHIFT Companies should make a more fundamental shift, from helping employees cope with stress to helping them remove the sources of stress. That means focusing less on programs and more on practical support. Less on providing resources and more on providing resolution. Less on asking employees to be resilient and more on building systems that reduce the need for constant resilience. The old model of engagement assumed stability. The new reality is defined by constant change. Work is being rewritten, life is getting heavier, and employees are carrying both at once. In that environment, companies need to do more than demand resilience from employees. They need to build more resilient systems around them. That will be the defining employee experience challenge of the AI era. Jon Cooper is cofounder and CEO of Overalls.