Nobody is 78% engaged.

Take a look at measuring what matters today, how “simulacrum” plays a role and looking for something better. A People & Culture Index (PCI) 

What people are saying:  

• “We run regular pulse surveys. Not sure why. The results seem to have like zero correlation to any business results.” 

• “Our engagement survey is not engaging. Everyone hates it. It’s so boring.” 

• “We use X survey software. Not because it’s any good, but because we’ve been using it for seven years and couldn’t be bothered changing, and anyway all the other ones look the same to us. They all use the same questions.” 

• “It’s hard to get anyone to even do a survey these days. Everyone’s too clued on to data security. Nobody trusts the HR system.” 

• “Our CEO is a boomer so he loves eNPS scores.” 

• “We measure engagement because engagement is so important. But our people don’t engage with the survey and we don’t trust the results”  

Over the past year we have interviewed over one hundred HR professionals from around the world, helping us build our new product, The People & Culture Index (PCI). Above are some examples of actual verbatim comments from our interviewees that really stood out, and there were many more just like them.  

Below I’ll talk a bit about the PCI, but first, we encourage a quick recap of the more popular and enduring staff survey products. Most of the pulse / engagement / culture surveys out and about for the past 30 years or so follow well-formed (but dated) psychometric frameworks.  

The most obvious example is the Net Promoter Score (NPs), dating back to 2003 that’s built on a single item: a “likelihood to recommend” measure borrowed from earlier customer satisfaction research. It’s over two decades old and still dominates both customer and employee engagement surveys despite obvious methodological criticism (eg: that single-item measures have poor reliability, and the 0-10 scale collapses a lot of nuance into one number).

Another example is the Gallup Q12, developed in the late 1990s, which underpins most “employee engagement” surveys still sold today. It’s built on Gallup’s earlier work in the 1980s identifying 12 questions correlated with productivity outcomes. It’s a fixed, closed-question instrument, meaning the framework decides in advance what matters (recognition, having a best friend at work, knowing what’s expected of you).  

Note: Their website claims that ‘highly engaged’ staff are 28% less likely to steal from the company. Really? Oh come on now. 

We’ve taken a different route. Rather than start with the psychometric framework, we’ve taken an anthropological approach and actually asked HR people what they think of these surveys, and what they would ideally like to see on staff surveys in 2026 and beyond. That is, we asked them: “What is it that you actually want to know about your staff?” and “What is it that the staff want to be asked?”  

The result was a more authentic approach that aligned better to what matters to people at work and examining the “perception gap” between where leaders think they are and contrast that to where staff think they are.  The culmination is the PCI on to which we bring our world-leading data science. 

We do not want to dwell too long on the merit of other models, but instead, offer something different and more valuable to the modern, 2026+ workplace. I do want to provide at least one more nuanced criticism of existing survey frameworks by referencing the ideas of the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (I hope he doesn’t mind). 

One of Baudrillard’s ideas is that ‘signs’ (such as a ‘score’) should represent reality, and they maybe once did, but over time ‘signs’ can stop referring to anything real and start only referring to themselves. That’s what he called a simulacrum, a copy with no original. 

When Engagement Scores Become the Simulacrum: Why Measuring Engagement Isn’t the Same as Engagement

Engagement Scores were invented to represent something real (people’s relationship to their work). But once it became a KPI, we believe (with the help of our interviews) that organisations started to manage the number itself rather than the underlying human reality it was meant to reflect. Leaders act to move the score instead of, you know, actually changing how people feel about work. These days, from what we’re hearing, the score refers only to itself, a system optimising its own output, disconnected from the lived experience it is supposed to measure. We have heard anecdotally that staff have felt pressure to give more favourable scores.

Baudrillard enjoyed Borges’ fable of the cartographer who built a map so detailed it exactly covered the empire and eventually the map replaced the territory it was meant to represent. That’s Baudrillard’s “precession of simulacra”: the map no longer represents the territory. It has replaced it. 

Likewise, the engagement score has become more real, in organisational terms, than engagement itself. And anecdotally, according to Gallups “State of the Global Workplace 2026” report, it’s still in steady decline. 

Now, the PCI also has a score, so we better make sure we don’t follow that same path, but as you will see, the PCI takes a different structural approach. Instead of asking one group to describe reality and reporting their answer as fact, it runs two instruments side by side: one for leaders, one for staff. The finding is therefore nuanced. Sure, there’s an overall score, but it’s driven largely by the calculated distance between the two. 

A leader might say “AI Readiness” is the most pressing concern at work, but the staff might say no, it’s “Flexible Working”. The leaders might say staff are fully trained in AI governance but the staff may vehemently disagree. The PCI reports the gap itself as the diagnostic. One overlooked piece of data that comes up quite a lot in our surveys is the chance to select “I Don’t Know” to many queries. The results are astounding. One recent customer encountered a leadership count of just over 60% and over 80% of staff selecting “I Don’t Know” in answer to a question about whether or not the AI they use had been researched well-enough to ensure ‘best-fit’.  

A gap is much harder to manage into submission than a single score. You can’t inflate it with a token gesture that nudges the number upward. To close a perception gap, leaders have to change something staff actually notice in their day-to-day work. The measurement stays tethered to lived experience, because it’s built from two competing lived experiences rather than one averaged-out abstraction. 

And… it has modern, relevant questions, that staff want to be asked. 

Bridging the gap, looking for that ever-elusive ‘alignment’ is then a better number to track against retention, productivity, profits, absenteeism and even, if you insist on keeping it, the eNPS. It is true to say that PCI can replace a legacy system, but if you’re wedded to it, the PCI can also augment one. It can be used as both complementary and in correlation to other ‘scores’ like eNPS, thus collating more plentiful data to measure and track against company KPI’s.

For more reading, please go to: https://atlas.culturalinfusion.com/pci/ or if you want to book a demo and see how it all works, we’d love to get your feedback and share more of our insights – please contact us below. 

Oh, and one more very important point of difference between PCI and ‘all the others’. PCI is, like all Atlas platform products, properly, wholly, totally and beautifully ANONYMOUS  – which staff love. 

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