September 2026 Group Learning: The Engagement Fallacy
Watch our September 2026 session “The Engagement Fallacy: What Your Best Scores Are Hiding, and What It Costs” with Ethan McCarty and Eliot Mizrachi from Integral.
Engagement has been the default measure of workforce health for two decades. The 2026 Integral Index finds that one of the greatest organizational risks hides inside the highest scores. A third of employees are Captive Contributors, engaged in the work but tethered by benefits, and they describe a corrosive workplace at more than three times the rate of employees who have already checked out. The Index isolates five conditions that separate a supportive workplace from a corrosive one, then puts a number on what they are worth. Poor conditions carry a modeled cost of roughly $562,000 per 100 employees per year across attrition, productivity, employer brand and job lock. This session connects the diagnosis to the dollars.
Participants will learn to:
- Explain why a rising engagement score can coexist with rising organizational risk.
- Diagnose their organization against five conditions that shape workplace climate.
- Translate those conditions into a per-100-employees cost frame finance recognizes.
Instructor: Ethan McCarty is the founder and CEO of Integral, an award-winning employee experience agency, where he works closely with business leaders in communications, HR, marketing and technology. Ethan has more than 20 years of experience leading digital communications, engagement and marketing, including as global head of employee and innovation communications at Bloomberg LP, global director of social strategy at IBM and global editor in chief of IBM's intranet. He's also a trustee of the Institute for Public Relations, chair of Page Up and a lecturer in strategic communications, digital media and analytics at Columbia University.
Instructor: Eliot Mizrachi is the CEO and founder of Kadima Strategies, a consultancy focused on research, thought leadership and strategy, with a growing focus on responsible AI. He is also the research lead and editor-in-chief of the 2026 Integral Index. For 12 years he led strategy and thought leadership at Page, working with CCOs to develop leading-edge thinking, including a handbook on culture change co-created with none other than Ethan and his team at Integral. Eliot wrote this year's Index, which means he knows where all the bodies are buried in the data.
About Group Learnings: These sessions will take place via Zoom nearly every month and will be 60 minutes long. In addition to a presentation from a credentialed instructor, there will be an interactive/Q&A portion toward the end of the session. If you are unable to join the live program, an on-demand recording will be made available post-event (along with presentation slides).