Beyond Engagement Scores: Why Trust at Work Has to Be Rebuilt in the Body, Not the Slide Deck
Employee engagement isn't flat because people stopped caring. It's flat because most engagement programs train the brain and skip the body — and trust, like fear, is something people feel before they can explain it. That gap between what a survey measures and what a room actually feels is why so many culture initiatives produce a great slide and no change in behavior.
I've spent the last several years on the other side of the microphone, asking workers — on the podcast, in facilitation rooms, in listening booths at live events — what's actually happening underneath their engagement scores. The answer is remarkably consistent: people aren't disengaged because they lack a "why." They're disengaged because they've learned, correctly, that naming a problem out loud rarely changes anything.
The Data Behind the Flatline
You don't need me to tell you something is off. Gallup has been measuring it for years, and the numbers keep confirming it:
37% of U.S. employees strongly agree they're treated with respect at work — tying the record low Gallup first recorded in 2022, in data they've tracked since 2018.
Global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025 — its lowest level since 2020 — which Gallup estimates cost the world economy roughly $10 trillion in lost productivity.
Separately, in a Harvard Business Review study of nearly 20,000 employees worldwide, Georgetown's Christine Porath found that respect was ranked the single most important leadership behavior — ahead of recognition, inspiring vision, useful feedback, and even opportunities for growth.
None of this is because leaders stopped investing. Organizations pour enormous sums into engagement surveys, culture consultants, and leadership training every year. The investment isn't the problem. What's being trained is.
Why Cognitive Training Doesn't Stick
Most engagement work — trainings, workshops, all-hands sessions on "psychological safety" — appeals to the brain. People nod along, take notes, and go back to their desks unchanged, because the part of us that decides whether a room is safe isn't the analytical part. It's older than that. It's the part that reads tone of voice, body language, and whether the last person who spoke up got quietly punished for it.
That's why annual surveys are, structurally, a lagging indicator. They capture what people were willing to admit to a form, months after the fact — not what's true in the room, right now. And it's why so much culture work amounts to what I'd call performative compliance: people check the box on a training while mentally checking their email, because nothing about the format asked their body to register anything different.
This isn't a critique of the people running these programs. Most People & Culture leaders I talk to are doing genuinely good work with genuinely constrained tools. The tools are the issue.
What Dignity Actually Means (And Why It's Different From "Culture")
Dignity, in the framework we work from — developed by Dr. Donna Hicks over decades of conflict-resolution work — isn't a mood or a perk. It's a state of inherent, unconditional worth that every person has simply by being human, and it's an embodied skill that gets practiced or violated in small moments, constantly: whether someone's idea gets credited, whether a mistake gets met with curiosity or blame, whether a team member feels safe enough to say "I don't know."
As Hicks puts it, understanding the human experience means recognizing that "the strength of relationships is dependent on the extent to which people feel their worth is valued and recognized."
That's a structurally different starting point than "engagement." Engagement asks whether someone is motivated to perform. Dignity asks whether someone has been given the conditions to be honest. Get the second one right, and the first one tends to follow.
What This Looks Like in Practice
We built a four-part method that engages people at all three levels — head, heart, and body — instead of just the first:
Listen. Participants share, in their own words, how they actually experience dignity at work — what gets in the way of it, and what opens up when it's present. This is raw, unfiltered, real-time qualitative data, not a Likert scale.
Reflect. We edit those voices into themes and play them back to the room. People hear themselves and each other — which creates immediate, verified consensus instead of the fragmented, performative version of "alignment" most teams settle for.
Move. Guided somatic practice lets the room physically feel the absence of dignity, and then its return, together. This is the part cognitive training skips entirely — and it's the part that actually rewires how people respond under pressure, because the nervous system learns differently than the notebook does.
Build. Participants apply the core dignity competencies — safety, recognition, fairness, accountability — to realistic workplace scenarios, so the shift has somewhere to land once the session ends.
We ran this format with 100 People & Culture and Leadership Development leaders in Chicago. Devices got put away without anyone asking. People who had stayed quiet for two full days of programming spoke up — not because we told them to, but because the room had built enough dignity to make it safe. That's not a soft outcome. It's a measurable one: reduced turnover drivers, faster re-engagement with the actual work, more agility through AI-era anxiety, and restored trust in leadership.
How to Bring This Into Your Organization
This is the work behind The Dignity Sessions — an embodied leadership experience built for high-stakes organizational change, designed to sit alongside (not replace) whatever engagement infrastructure you already have. It flexes to fit where you are:
The Interactive Keynote (45–75 minutes) — best for all-hands meetings, leadership development programming, and conferences.
The Skill-Building Workshop (2–4 hours) — best for leadership summits, offsites, and strategic planning sessions.
The Full Activation (multi-day) — a listening booth, overnight edit, and custom closing session built from your own room's voices, best for offsites and HR-driven culture weeks.
Every format is designed for rooms of 30 to 150 people — small enough to feel, big enough to matter.
FAQ
What is workplace dignity, and how is it different from psychological safety? Dignity is the underlying sense of inherent worth every person carries; psychological safety is one of its downstream effects. You can't manufacture psychological safety directly — but you can build the conditions of dignity (safety, recognition, fairness, accountability) that make it possible.
Is this a wellness session? No. It's facilitated organizational development work with a measurement layer — a qualitative sentiment report, pre/post pulse data on trust and psychological safety, and a shared behavioral vocabulary your team can reference afterward.
How long does a Dignity Session take? Anywhere from a 45-minute keynote to a multi-day activation, depending on your goals and room size.
Who is this for? HR Business Partners, DEI and Talent Development leaders, and executive teams planning offsites, all-hands meetings, or leadership summits for groups of 30–150.
If your engagement scores are telling you something is wrong but not what it feels like, that's exactly the gap this closes. Get in touch to talk through a fit for your team →
Aparna Rae is co-founder of Circle Back Club, where she and Lars Gallien work at the intersection of somatics and strategy to help organizations rebuild trust and reduce conflict.
