Stop Treating Culture Like a Perk: Reframing Engagement as Adaptive Work

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Employee engagement is down. Again.

And yet, the go-to responses remain the same: roll out a new perk, launch a gratitude initiative, reframe values with bolder posters and shinier taglines.

But what if low engagement isn’t a morale problem? What if it’s a signal that your organization is avoiding the real work?

From an Adaptive Leadership lens, disengagement is often a symptom of adaptive stress—the kind of tension that arises when people are asked to operate differently, but haven’t had the chance to grapple with what that change demands of them personally. It’s not just about change: it’s about loss, competing loyalties, and identity.

No wellness app, coffee gift card, or LEGO set can resolve that.

The Limits of Technical Fixes

Here’s how this misdiagnosis shows up:

• A nonprofit rolls out a new strategic plan but never acknowledges how much of the old mission staff still identify with. Enthusiasm fades, masked as “low morale.”

• A corporation restructures for efficiency, yet cuts out the very teams most affected by the change. Participation drops, and leaders misread the silence as apathy.

• A startup hires for diversity but avoids the tension of real inclusion. Culture becomes polite, performative, and distant.

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These are not technical problems with straightforward solutions. They are adaptive challenges, which require people - across all levels - to shift how they see, act, and relate. And that’s messy, emotional work.

When organizations treat culture like a perk rather than a shared process, they miss the opportunity to lead adaptively.

Reframing the Work

If you’re seeing disengagement on your team or in your organization, consider asking:

1. What are people being asked to leave behind? (And have you honored that loss?)

2. Whose values are being tested by the current direction?

3. What conversations are we avoiding? Not because they’re off-limits (explicitly, anyway), but because they’re uncomfortable?

   
   

These questions don’t lead to quick answers. But they do create the kind of holding environment where meaningful engagement can return. It will not return as a perk, however, but as a byproduct of doing the real work together.

Culture isn’t built in HR. It’s forged in the heat of adaptive challenge: through hard conversations, realignment of roles, and shared ownership of what comes next.

If you want engagement to rise, stop trying to make people feel better. Start creating the conditions for them to go deeper.