Leading organizations like Bayer & Citibank have realized that traditional hierarchies “create friction in a knowledge economy that demands speed and  judgment”, argues Alex McCann, an entrepreneur on a mission to rethink careers and work, in an exclusive UNLEASH OpEd. HR leaders need to take urgent action to “shift attention from sentiment to structure”.

Most large companies treat employee disengagement the same way they’ve treated it for the past fifteen years: identify the symptom, buy a program, measure the result, wonder why nothing changed, and repeat.

The scale of this cycle is remarkable. American companies spend over $100 billion per year on employee engagement initiatives, from wellness programs and pulse surveys to recognition platforms and employer branding campaigns.

And according to Gallup’s 2025 State of the Global Workplace report, global employee engagement just fell to 21%, a drop that matches the decline during COVID-19 lockdowns. The cost of that disengagement: $438 billion in lost productivity.

Something about this HR approach has been fundamentally broken for a long time.

HR keeps solving a culture problem with culture tools

The standard playbook for declining engagement has barely changed. Scores drop, so companies introduce a new perk, launch a listening initiative, or redesign the office kitchen.

Jacob Morgan wrote about this pattern in Harvard Business Review back in 2017, describing most engagement programs as “an adrenaline shot” that provides a short-term boost before scores drift back down.

Eight years later, the cycle continues.

The programs themselves are fine. Recognition matters, listening matters, wellness support matters. The issue is that these are all interventions aimed at how people feel about their work, while the org chart determines what their work is.

Most large organizations carry somewhere between eight and twelve management layers, and each one adds friction to decisions, distance from outcomes, and a subtle but persistent message to the people below: your judgment alone is insufficient.

Over time, talented people spend more of their day managing the process of getting work approved than doing the work itself.

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