By Bassem Hamdy, CEO & Co-Founder of Briq
Only 32% of U.S. employees are actively engaged at work right now. That number has been falling for five years straight. Companies are spending more than ever on engagement surveys, pulse checks, eNPS scores, and culture consultants. And the needle isn’t moving.
Maybe we’re measuring the wrong thing.
I’ve spent 26 years in physical industries. Construction, manufacturing, energy. Environments where people work hard, care about what they build, and will tell you exactly what they think. What I’ve learned is that most employee experience problems aren’t sentiment problems. They’re work design problems. And no survey is going to fix that.
The 60% Problem
Asana’s Anatomy of Work Index, which surveyed over 10,000 knowledge workers globally, found that 60% of a person’s time at work is spent on what they call “work about work.” Not the skilled work they were hired to do. The administrative overhead that accumulated around it. Chasing updates. Switching between tools. Searching for information. Managing shifting priorities. Duplicating effort because systems don’t talk to each other.
Miro’s 2025 research put it even more starkly: for every one hour of creative, strategic work, employees spend three hours on maintenance tasks. Emails, reporting, reformatting, reconciling. The ratio is inverted. The thing the person was hired to do is the minority of their actual day.
Now think about what happens when you survey those people. You ask them how engaged they feel, how connected they are to the company mission, whether their manager communicates well. They give you a number. You put it in a dashboard. Maybe you launch an initiative.
But nobody asked the more fundamental question: how much of this person’s day is actually spent on work that requires them?
Surveys Measure Sentiment. They Don’t Measure Work.
There’s nothing wrong with understanding how employees feel. But feelings are downstream of something more structural. If someone spends 70% of their week on tasks that could be handled by a system, a script, or a smarter process, their engagement score is a symptom, not a diagnosis.
Gallup found that one of the biggest drivers of disengagement is employees feeling uncertain about what’s expected of them. That makes sense. When most of your day is consumed by reactive, administrative work, the actual purpose of your role gets blurry. You were hired to be a financial strategist, but you spend your time as a human integration layer between disconnected systems. You were hired to manage projects, but you spend Fridays compiling reports from five different platforms instead of preparing for Monday’s client meeting.
The role drift is invisible because it happens gradually. One more report to compile. One more system to manually update. One more workaround for tools that don’t connect. Each one is small. In aggregate, they redefine the job.
And here’s what engagement surveys miss entirely: people don’t always know to complain about it. They’ve accepted the tedious parts as “just part of the job.” You won’t find “I spend 30 hours a month on work that doesn’t require my expertise” in a free-text comment box. But it’s silently driving the burnout, the detachment, and eventually the resignation.
What Changes When You Fix the Work Itself
I’ve watched this play out in our own customer base. When companies identify the specific workflows eating their people’s time and either redesign or automate them, the impact goes far beyond efficiency metrics.
A CFO at a mid-size firm was spending six hours per project on certified payroll processing. Not financial analysis. Not strategic planning. File management. After that process was automated, she didn’t just get time back. She started doing the work she was actually hired to do. Forecasting. Advising leadership. The work that moves a business forward. Her title didn’t change. Her job did.
That shift is the employee experience improvement that never shows up in a survey, because nobody was asking about it in the first place.
What’s more interesting is what happens at the team level. When people stop spending their days on low-value administrative work, they naturally migrate toward higher-judgment tasks. The person who was processing invoices starts analyzing payment patterns. The project coordinator who was chasing documentation starts focusing on client relationships. You don’t have to mandate this. People gravitate toward meaningful work when the meaningless work gets out of the way.
The CX Connection Nobody Makes
Here’s where this gets relevant beyond HR. Employee experience and customer experience are not separate disciplines. They’re the same system viewed from different angles.
When your project manager is spending Friday compiling a status report from five different tools, they’re not preparing for Monday’s client meeting. When your finance team is buried in data entry, they’re not catching the billing discrepancy that’s about to frustrate a customer. When your operations leader is chasing documentation instead of managing vendor relationships, service quality drifts.
The connection is direct but rarely measured. Customer experience leaders invest heavily in journey mapping, personalization, and feedback loops. All important. But if the people delivering that experience are spending most of their cognitive capacity on administrative overhead, you’re building a great customer experience on a workforce that’s already exhausted before they get to the customer-facing part of their job.
Miro’s research found that 61% of knowledge workers say maintenance work distracts them from their core responsibilities, and 52% say it’s a direct source of stress. Half of those surveyed said they would leave a job if the maintenance burden were too great. That’s not a culture problem you can fix with a team lunch. That’s a structural problem that requires redesigning how work actually gets done.
The Recruiting Signal
The composition of work isn’t just a retention issue. It’s a recruiting issue. Younger workers entering the workforce have grown up with tools that handle things automatically. When they walk into a company and discover the job involves hours of manual data transfer between systems that should be connected, they don’t think “that’s just how it works.” They think “why hasn’t this been fixed?”
I’ve heard this directly from companies I work with. Candidates choosing competitors because those firms showed them modern tools during the interview. The deciding factor wasn’t compensation. It was what their day-to-day would actually look like.
If your employee experience strategy doesn’t include an honest audit of what people’s jobs actually require them to do hour by hour, you’re optimizing the wrapper while ignoring what’s inside.
A Different Kind of Audit
So here’s my challenge to anyone responsible for employee experience, customer experience, or both. Before you run another engagement survey, do something simpler. Ask ten people across your organization to track, for one week, how they actually spend their time. Not in categories like “meetings” and “email.” In specifics. How many hours copying data between systems. How many hours compiling reports that could be assembled automatically. How many hours chasing information that should be accessible.
The answers will tell you more about your employee experience than any sentiment score ever could. And unlike a survey, they point directly at what to fix.
The companies that will win the next decade of talent competition aren’t the ones with the best perks or the highest engagement scores. They’re the ones that looked at what their people actually do all day and decided to make it better. Not better in the abstract sense. Better in the concrete sense of removing the work that never should have been theirs in the first place.
That’s the employee experience metric worth measuring. Not how people feel about their jobs. But whether their jobs deserve how they feel.
Bassem Hamdy is the CEO and co-founder of Briq, an autonomous workforce platform for physical industries. He previously served as SVP of Marketing and Strategy at Procore, where he helped scale the company from $10M to $100M ARR.
