LAST UPDATED: November 5, 2025 at 5:11PM

by Braden Kelley

Last month I had the opportunity to attend Customer Contact Week (CCW) in Nashville, Tennessee and following up on my article The Voicebots Are Coming I’d like to dig into what Shantel Love had to say about the importance of keeping employee engaged as artificial intelligence (AI) starts to take over, and a framework she shared that can help you do so.

Shantel spoke about how Gallup statistics show that for U.S. employees in early 2025, 31% are engaged, 17% are actively disengaged, and 52% are not engaged. This reflects a decade-low engagement level, with active disengagement also at 2014 levels. The global cost of disengagement is estimated at $8.8 trillion annually, or about 9% of global GDP. These statistics are shocking. Do you think they represent reality? If not, leave a comment below supporting your dissent.

Shantel also spoke about how employee disengagement can seep into your profits, customer experience and culture, and that while you can lead a horse to water, you can’t make it drink, but you can make it thirsty. Right on queue comes in Shantel’s WATER framework, for which I have summarized some of the key insights for each of the key components below.

Work That Matters

• Does anyone even care about this?
• 70% of employees disengage because they can’t connect their work to purpose (World Economic Forum)
• If your team disappeared tomorrow, what would the business lose?
• Write down what the business would lose and tell your team to give them the why (their value and their purpose)

AI as an Accelerator not a threat

• AI won’t replace you but it will replace the invisible employee
• Employees are still left with the work that nobody notices
• As an exercise, ask AI to take your last big project and rewrite it in language that makes your leadership visible
• How can I make our customer sentiment visible to leadership? (inputting the sentiments with this AI prompt)

Transparency and Trust

• Disengagement is a hidden problem – a profit leak
• “Psychological safety is the strongest predictor of innovation across distributed teams.” (MIT Sloan)
• People don’t leave a company, they leave a manager – 70% of disengagement starts at the manager level – Managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement (Is the real point this second one?) — Gallup
• What is one belief my team or customer needs restored right now? (transformation you will lead – what you will act on)

Embrace Personal Branding

• Most organizations believe that if you encourage your employees to invest in their personal brand, then they are going to leave
• Most people achieve less than 20% of their true potential (Forbes)
• 73% of social media managers say employee post have double the engagement of regular business posts, and 26% say employees triple brand engagement (GaggleAMP)
• The biggest room in the world is the room for improvement

Recognition That’s Real

• “79% of employees quite because they feel underappreciated.” (OC Tanner research)
• You made an impact this week because …

It goes without saying that if you lead your employees to WATER you will find them more engaged (meaning they are no longer disengaged) and as a result they will be of greater service to your customers, and by extension your shareholders. Employee engagement matters, and the pursuit of it by your managers will not only create better leaders, but it will also engage your managers. So, are you ready to give your employees a drink of WATER or are going to insist on keeping them thirsty?

Image credits: Customer Management Practice (CMP)

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