The Reason Your People Aren’t Engaged

When I sit down with clients, I can almost predict when the conversation will turn to employee engagement—or rather, the complete lack of it. “My team just seems checked out,” they tell me, looking genuinely puzzled. “They do the bare minimum, show up late to meetings, and I can’t figure out what’s wrong.” What they don’t realize is that they’re describing a classic case of psychological needs gone unmet, and the human brain’s predictable response to that deprivation.

Here’s what’s really happening: William Kahn’s 1990 research was a turning point in understanding what truly drives employee engagement. He found that employees fully engage at work only when three psychological conditions are present: meaningfulness, safety, and availability. When any of these is missing, people don’t consciously decide to disengage; they unconsciously protect themselves by withdrawing. It’s not laziness or attitude problems—it’s basic human psychology.

Meaningfulness is the sense that one’s work is significant and personally valuable. People want to feel that what they do matters—whether it’s moving the needle for a project, using their unique skills, or contributing to a larger mission. When tasks align with personal values or allow room for creativity and autonomy, employees feel more invested. If work feels pointless or disconnected from their interests, it’s almost impossible to bring their “full self” to the task. The meaningfulness piece is particularly brutal in technical environments. Engineers spend years developing expertise, only to find themselves implementing features they don’t understand the purpose of, or worse, working on projects that get cancelled before launch. When your work feels pointless, your brain starts conserving energy for things that actually matter. This lines up perfectly with Edward Deci and Richard Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory: humans have an innate need for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Strip away someone’s sense that their work matters, and you’ve essentially asked them to invest their life force in something meaningless.

Safety means being able to express and employ one’s true self at work without fear of negative consequences—like damage to reputation, status, or career. Kahn defined psychological safety as the freedom to speak up, ask questions, admit mistakes, or share new ideas without feeling exposed or threatened. Teams that encourage open dialogue and accept vulnerability allow employees to experiment and innovate rather than hide or play it safe. Amy Edmondson has spent decades researching this: employees disengage when they can’t speak up about problems, ask questions without looking incompetent, or admit mistakes without fear of punishment. In high-pressure environments where “failure is not an option,” people learn to keep their heads down and do exactly what’s asked—nothing more. The irony is that this creates the very mediocrity leaders are trying to avoid.

Availability refers to the sense of having the physical, emotional, and psychological resources needed to engage—being ready and able to commit energy at work. Employees who feel drained, stressed, distracted, or stuck with external pressures cannot meaningfully participate, no matter how motivated they are. When people have support, time for recovery, and a manageable workload, their energy and focus are far higher. Daniel Pink’s Drive theory adds another layer—the complete failure of traditional motivation. When organizations rely on external rewards and punishments to drive engagement, they’re fighting against how human motivation actually works. People need autonomy to direct their own work, mastery to grow their skills, and purpose to understand why their efforts matter. Remove these, and you get compliance at best, active disengagement at worst.

Kahn showed that for genuine engagement, these three conditions must come together. Engagement isn’t just about working hard—it’s about being fully present, energetic, and wholeheartedly involved in the work role: physically, cognitively, and emotionally. When any condition is missing, employees drift into disengagement, holding back their ideas, effort, and creativity. The real tragedy is that most leaders create disengagement without realizing it. They micromanage (destroying autonomy), focus only on deliverables without explaining impact (removing purpose), and create environments where admitting problems feels dangerous (eliminating safety). Then they wonder why their “top talent” seems unmotivated.

But here’s the thing—once you understand these psychological drivers, fixing engagement becomes less about motivational speeches and more about removing the barriers to natural human motivation. When people feel their work matters, when they can speak up without fear, and when they have some control over how they do their job, engagement isn’t something you have to create. It’s something that naturally emerges.

The research tells us that employee disengagement isn’t a character flaw or generational issue. It’s the predictable result of psychological needs being ignored or actively frustrated. And the first step to fixing it is admitting that the problem isn’t with the employees—it’s with how we’ve structured the work environment itself.