Your Engagement Survey Isn't Lying to You. It's Just Not Telling You Enough.

I want to be clear about something before I start.

Engagement surveys are not the enemy. The people who designed them were trying to solve a real problem. They wanted to give organisations a way to hear from their people. That matters. I'm not here to tell you to bin yours.

But I am here to tell you that your engagement score and your pressure level are two completely different numbers. And most organisations have never been told that.

Here's what engagement surveys are designed to measure.

How people feel about working for you. Whether they feel seen, valued, equipped, and connected. Whether they'd recommend you as an employer. Whether they feel their opinions count.

That is genuinely useful information.

Here's what they cannot tell you.

Whether the role your highest performer is in is structurally overloaded. Whether pressure is pooling in specific teams or functions because of how work is distributed. Whether the gap between what leadership believes is happening and what is actually happening on the ground is 10 points or 40. Whether the people scoring highest on engagement are six months from breaking point because their commitment is the very thing the system is exploiting.

I've seen this pattern more times than I can count. An organisation runs its annual engagement survey. The results come back well. Leadership feels reassured. Six weeks later one of their best people hands in their notice and everyone is shocked.

They shouldn't be.

Here's the thing about engagement surveys that nobody explains clearly enough. They measure what people are willing to say out loud. Under conditions the organisation creates. At a moment in time. And in organisations where speaking up has historically had consequences, where the last person who raised something difficult was quietly moved sideways, or thanked and ignored, or labelled as a problem, the survey returns the culture's official version of the truth.

Not the actual truth.

People are not lying. They are calculating. The risk of honesty against the cost of silence. And in most organisations, silence is winning.

There is also something I call the commitment trap. Your most engaged people are often your most pressured people. Because they care. Because they say yes. Because the system has learned it can load them and they will hold it. Their engagement score stays high right up until the moment they resign. And then everyone asks what happened.

What happened was visible for months. In the pace change. In the tone flattening. In the small errors from someone who never made errors. In the single sick days nobody connected. In the withdrawal of someone who used to go above and beyond.

The engagement survey didn't catch any of it. Because it wasn't designed to.

Pressure Literacy doesn't ask how people feel. It reads what the system is doing. Structural load. Role distribution. Warning signs. Leadership perception gaps. Patterns that don't require a single person to feel safe enough to say anything.

Engagement tells you how people feel about the organisation.

Pressure Literacy tells you what the organisation is doing to people.

Both matter. They are not the same instrument. And running only one of them is like checking your blood pressure but never checking what's causing it to rise.

Your engagement score is one part of the picture.

Pressure Literacy reads the rest of it.

Nikki