The Truth About Engagement Scores
What if we’re focusing on the wrong employees when it comes to engagement?
In this episode of Culture Conversations, Megan Robinson sits down with Noah L. Pusey, Co-Founder and CEO of Ripple Analytics, to challenge some common assumptions about employee engagement. Organizations spend significant time measuring engagement and even more time trying to improve it. But what if the better question isn’t how to turn every disengaged employee into an engaged one? Noah offers a different perspective: understand who is already engaged, recognize what they contribute, and make sure your best people have a reason to stay.
Tease Key Insights
Engagement Scores Aren’t Moving Much
Organizations have invested heavily in engagement initiatives, yet overall engagement levels have remained relatively consistent over time. That raises an important question: Are organizations putting their energy in the right place?
Rather than assuming every disengaged employee can (or should) be converted into a highly engaged one, Noah challenges leaders to look more closely at the employees who are already contributing, participating, and strengthening the culture.
Don’t Lose Your Engaged Employees
When leaders spend most of their attention addressing disengagement, their strongest employees can quietly become overlooked. Engaged employees often carry more than their share of the workload, support their coworkers, contribute to the culture, and step in when something needs to get done.
But that engagement shouldn’t be taken for granted. Recognition, meaningful feedback, development opportunities, and simply asking, “What can I do to help you succeed?” can make a significant difference.
Trust and Empathy Tell You a Lot About Culture
Technical skills matter, but two qualities can reveal a surprising amount about what is happening inside an organization: trust and empathy.
When employees trust one another and experience empathy from the people around them, it can provide leaders with valuable insight into the strength of the culture. And when those qualities are missing, leaders need to pay attention.
Leaders Have to Participate, Too
You can’t ask employees to engage in a process that leadership treats as optional. Noah shares the example of a company president who wanted employees to participate in a feedback program but excluded himself from it. Participation suffered.
The message employees received was clear: this matters for you, but not for me. Culture is shaped by what leaders actually do, not simply what they ask everyone else to do.
Why This Matters
Employee engagement isn’t simply another HR metric. It influences how people work together, whether employees feel recognized, how teams perform, and ultimately whether strong employees decide to stay.
Instead of investing all of your energy into the people who are least engaged, consider what might happen if you became more intentional about supporting the people who already are. Recognize them. Listen to them. Understand their strengths. Give them meaningful feedback. Help them grow. And make sure your best people don't have to leave before you tell them how valuable they were.
Listen Now
Noah's perspective offers leaders a different way to think about employee engagement: stop assuming the goal is simply to move an engagement score higher. Instead, start asking better questions.
Who are the people strengthening our culture right now?
Do they know we recognize their contribution?
Are we spending so much time trying to fix disengagement that we're overlooking engagement?
Listen to the full episode and consider: Where is your organization investing its attention?
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Noah Pusey
President & CEO
Noah Pusey is the President and CEO of Ripple Analytics - a cloud-based talent assessment platform that replaces the annual review with timely, objective and actionable peer-to-peer data. Ripple disrupts how organizations evaluate talent and empowers leaders to build stronger, engaged, efficient, productive and culture-driven teams.
Noah received his undergraduate degree from Boston College and his law degree from Brooklyn Law School. He enjoys golf, skiing, traveling and hiking.
Noah is the proud father of 4 adult children and was born and raised on a small farm in southern Vermont where his parents still live.
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