Albert Camus wrote that life is absurd: we long for meaning, yet the universe responds with silence. Engagement surveys mirror this paradox. Employees pour their hopes, frustrations, and insights into surveys, often in vulnerable detail. And what do they receive? A handful of broad action items, a few bullet-point promises, and the lingering silence of systemic inertia.
The Absurdity of the Engagement Survey Cycle
Most organizations run surveys on autopilot:
- Collect the data.
- Publish top-line results.
- Share three “enterprise actions.”
- Tell managers to cascade and “own it.”
The absurdity appears quickly:
- Too much feedback, not enough action. Thousands of comments compressed into bullet points.
- Systemic issues, local accountability. Problems like workload, pay equity, and trust in leadership dropped on individual managers’ desks.
- Silence where dialogue is needed. Employees wonder if anyone truly listened.
Just as Camus saw life as absurd when our hunger for meaning meets silence, employees experience the same when survey feedback meets corporate minimalism.
Bad Faith Responses: When Leaders Retreat
Like Sartre’s bad faith, leaders often retreat into oversimplified responses to avoid the weight of the data:
- “We’ll communicate more.”
- “We’ll offer new training.”
- “We’ll create a task force.”
These gestures may be sincere, but they often skim the surface. They avoid the radical truth: many engagement issues are not local but systemic: compensation philosophies, workload distribution, leadership trust, organizational design. Asking individual managers to “fix it” is like asking a line employee to change gravity.
The Call to Rebellion
Camus’s answer to absurdity was not despair, it was rebellion. To rebel is to confront the silence honestly, and still choose to create meaning. For organizations, rebellion means refusing to reduce surveys to communication exercises. It means reimagining engagement not as a set of action items, but as an existential challenge:
- Face systemic truths. If workload is unsustainable, no amount of recognition programs will fix it. If employees don’t trust leadership, no “pulse check” email will restore it.
- Reframe ownership. Stop handing systemic problems to individual leaders. Engagement action should live at the system level as well as the team level.
- Redistribute the conversation. Instead of cascading bullet points, create dialogue spaces where leaders and employees grapple with tough realities together.
Toward Radical Engagement
So how do we move from absurd cycles to radical authenticity? A few shifts:
- From Data to Dialogue
- Treat survey results as the beginning of a conversation, not the end. Leaders should sit with teams to interpret results together, not hand down pre-packaged answers.
- From Pithy Promises to Structural Change
- Identify which issues are systemic (compensation, career paths, workload). Own them at the executive level with transparent timelines and progress reporting.
- From Leader Burden to Shared Responsibility
- Equip leaders with tools for what they can influence (team norms, communication, recognition). Free them from pretending they can fix structural problems alone.
- From Silence to Rebellion
- Be radically honest: “We heard your frustration. Some issues will take time, and some may not change quickly. But here’s where we’re choosing to rebel against the inertia.”
Closing Thought
Camus believed that once we accept the absurd, we are free to create meaning anyway. Engagement surveys, too, will always be tinged with absurdity: too many voices, too many demands, too many constraints. But organizations can choose rebellion by facing systemic truths, sharing responsibility, and transforming surveys into living dialogues rather than ritualistic silences.
Employee engagement is not about promising everything. It is about refusing to look away, and choosing, in the face of the absurd, to create meaning together.
The Corporate Existentialist 