Like many leaders during COVID, I found myself navigating a world of work that had been upended almost overnight. New patterns, new pressures, and entirely new emotional landscapes.
I remember conversations with team members who were supporting customers facing acute mental health crises, often after losing loved ones or working in isolation. These were capable, compassionate people doing their best, but they were exhausted. And the systems around them weren’t designed for that kind of strain.
No amount of resilience talk or individual coaching could fix what was essentially a systemic issue: too much demand, too little support, and not enough space to process the human impact of it all.
That experience stayed with me. It reminded me that leaders genuinely want to help people perform, but too often, the focus stays at the individual level. Real progress happens when we look beyond the person to the system, specifically how work is structured, led, and supported every day.
Research backs this up.What the Evidence Says
- Only 25% of productivity potential in most organisations comes from individual-level factors. The rest depends on systems design, management practices, and work environment. (WEF–McKinsey, 2025).
- Organisations that intentionally design for thriving report 45% higher productivity and 40% better retention compared to those without wellbeing-linked systems. (WEF–McKinsey, 2025).
- Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2025 found that only 21 % of employees are engaged, yet engagement rises sharply in organisations that redesign how work is done, not just how people behave.
- MIT Sloan’s report ‘Toxic Culture Is Driving the Great Resignation’ that toxic systems, poor communication, inequitable workloads, lack of voice are 10 × stronger predictors of attrition than pay.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth: engagement scores have been gamed to the point of irrelevance. They’ve become management KPIs and board comfort metrics, not tools for improving wellbeing or performance. Leaders are often ranked on their team’s engagement scores, baking bias straight into the system, rewarding popularity or short-term morale spikes while ignoring the real drivers like belonging, psychological safety, and quality ways-of-working.
What We’re Learning at Synata
Our early pilot data reinforces this: wellbeing, belonging, and performance correlate far more strongly with systemic enablers, things like leadership effectiveness, ways of working, role clarity, and psychological safety, than with engagement sentiment alone.
If the system is off, even your best people will struggle to perform.
Here’s what we’re seeing helps:
1️⃣ Zoom Out Before You Zoom In Before addressing individual performance, look for friction points in process, communication, or leadership that might be constraining the team.
2️⃣ Design the Environment for Success Thriving happens when ways of working, feedback loops, and wellbeing supports align, system, not heroics.
3️⃣ Measure Interactions, Not Just Outputs The quality of relationships and clarity between people often predict performance better than KPIs.
Maybe it’s time we stop asking who’s underperforming, and start asking what’s under-supporting them.
If you know someone who’s quietly holding their team together, please send this their way. The Inside Track might just remind them they’re part of a broader community built on supportive leadership and better ways of working.
And if this week’s reflection struck a chord, or you’d like to learn more about what we’re building with Synata.ai, I’d love to hear from you.
