the missing half of work redesign.
Randstad Advisory Signals from the Edge: this is a dispatch from your colleagues in 2030
Redesigning work for AI is only half the job; the other half is understanding the people doing it. Without intentional alignment, even efficient systems can lead to quiet disengagement. This guide highlights the two essential connections for a thriving workplace: the upward connection to a meaningful mission, and the inward connection to individual strengths. Discover why joy isn’t just a perk — it’s the vital signal that work is truly fulfilling. Learn how to map tasks to purpose and personality to keep your workforce connected and motivated.
Imagine it’s 2030. Looking back, the lessons are clear. We were learning to read from a different playbook. For years we measured the things that were easy to measure: engagement scores, productivity, retention rates. The dashboards were green. The surveys came back fine. The quarterly reviews passed without incident.
And underneath it all, we all knew that those metrics no longer reflected how work was changing. On the surface, everything looked fine. People were not leaving. They were not complaining. They were still present, but simply no longer connected to their work in the way they once were.
Still producing. Still attending. Still saying the right things in the right rooms. But the part that used to lean in, the part that brought extra thought, the honest question, the energy that could not be measured, had gone somewhere we could not see.
We ran more surveys. We redesigned the surveys. We held feedback sessions about the feedback sessions. None of it worked because none of it asked the right question.
The right question, we eventually understood, was this.
Does the work actually fit the people doing it, and does it still feel meaningful to them?
We eventually understood that people were losing their connection to work. Joy, or rather, its absence, was one of the clearest signs. And we learned, too late for some, that joy was never a benefit, a perk or a culture initiative. It was one of the clearest indicators that people still felt connected to their work and found it meaningful.
What we wish we had understood earlier:
People do not thrive in just any environment. They require the right conditions.
Work has to adapt to people, as much as people adapt to work. And when you redesign work without understanding the people doing it, it often fails to deliver the outcomes you hoped to achieve.
two sides of the same coin
We have been exploring one side of a coin: how to design work and the architecture, the redrawing of roles, the question of what work should become as AI changes what work can be. That side matters enormously. But it is only half.
The other half is the people — not as resources to be allocated across a redesigned structure, but as human beings whose potential is context-dependent, shaped by who they are, what they have built and what they are ultimately reaching for.
When you design the work without understanding these elements, you end up with a structurally elegant system that quietly fails to move anyone and lacks momentum. The connection to what drives people is the whole point. And it runs in two directions at once.
The first is upward. Work connected to something larger than the task itself — a purpose that aligns with a person's deeply held values and aspirations — ultimately shapes long-term engagement and action. Research by Bailey and Madden found that meaningfulness — the felt sense that your work connects to something beyond yourself — ranks above pay, rewards and promotion in what employees care about most. More strikingly, they found it is destroyed by poor management far more easily than it is ever created. When that upward connection is visible and real, people bring more of themselves.
The second is inward: work connected to who you actually are — your intrinsic traits, the things that energize you, the way your mind naturally works, the preferences that sit beneath skills and job titles. If research is where your mind comes alive, and the role is redesigned so the research disappears, you lose joy. Not because the mission is unclear or the team has broken, but because the work no longer draws on what you are built for. That connection to yourself has been severed, and no amount of purpose-setting can fix it.
Connection to work can break in two distinct ways. The upward connection breaks when people cannot see how their work matters to something they care about. The inward connection breaks when the work stops drawing on who they actually are.
Both are a loss. Both are costly. Joy is the felt experience of both connections being alive at once: work that draws on who you are, pointed at something that matters.
Understanding your people means understanding both. It requires genuine curiosity to know each person's intrinsic makeup, developed strengths and deeper aspirations, and a commitment to design the work around them.
the line between the task and the mission
The upward connection sounds straightforward. Define the purpose, communicate it clearly, and people will feel it. In practice, it is far harder than that, and the reason is counterintuitive.
The very thing that makes a mission inspiring — its scale, ambition and reach — can also make it harder for people to see how their daily work contributes to it. The mission lives at the top. The task lives at the desk. The challenge is connecting broad organizational goals to the realities of everyday work.
Andrew Carton spent years studying this gap using NASA archives during the space race. His research documented the precise mechanics by which leaders built meaning across an entire organization. His research suggested that employees often struggle to connect broad aspirational goals to their daily work. So leaders had to build that connection by acting as both communicators of vision and architects of meaning, mapping the connection for every role, not just the obvious ones.
There is a widely told story of President Kennedy visiting NASA in 1962 and meeting a janitor carrying a mop. He asked the man what he did. The janitor replied, “I'm helping put a man on the moon.”
Carton's research shows how the story reflects something real: a culture in which leaders have done the deliberate work of helping people see how their work contributes to a broader mission, structurally building connection and meaning at every level over years.
McKinsey's research reveals how rare this is in practice. While 70% of employees say their sense of purpose is defined through their work, only 15% of frontline employees feel able to actually live that purpose at work, compared to 85% of executives.
This is a design gap. When the line to the moon is never drawn — when people cannot see how their work contributes to a larger purpose — they begin to lose their connection to work. Research shows that they are 6.5 times less likely to demonstrate resilience and far more likely to quietly withdraw.
the connection that goes the other way
The upward connection is the one leaders tend to focus on. The inward connection is harder. It requires knowing each person individually rather than broadcasting to everyone at once. And being rooted in intrinsic traits and developed strengths, the inward connection has measurable consequences for both individuals and organizations.
Ryan and Deci's self-determination theory identifies competence, autonomy and relatedness as fundamental human needs. When work is redesigned away from what someone is genuinely capable of, it results in a measurable erosion of motivation and well-being.
Organizations see measurable gains when work is designed around people’s strengths. Gallup's research, drawn from more than 25 million assessments, shows that when people regularly use their strengths, organizations benefit from 72% lower attrition and 59% fewer safety incidents. Similarly, managers who focus on their people's strengths achieve a 60:1 ratio of engaged to disengaged employees, compared to just 2:1 for managers who focus on weaknesses.
Csikszentmihalyi's research on flow — the state of total absorption that produces the highest levels of intrinsic motivation and creative output — adds a further dimension. Flow requires a precise balance between challenge and skill. When a task within a particular person’s productive zone is automated or removed, flow becomes inaccessible. The work gets done, but the person is no longer fully engaged in it.
The bigger risk is what happens when the inward connection has broken, and the person cannot or does not leave. A meta-analysis by Humphrey, et al. on emotional labor found that surface acting — displaying engagement you do not feel, performing a version of yourself rather than being yourself — is consistently and significantly linked to burnout and emotional exhaustion. When freed capacity is reallocated into work that does not align with who a person is, the cognitive and emotional cost of that performance compounds silently. It does not appear in the numbers until much later. By then, the damage is done.
One organization decided not to wait for joy to emerge. Menlo Innovations, a small software company in Michigan, made creating the conditions for employee joy an explicit design goal, designing physical space, hiring practices and how people work together around that objective. Thousands of leaders visit every year, not to learn about software, but to see what work looks like when the design is deliberate.
The upward connection helps people see how their work connects to a broader objective. The inward connection helps them contribute in ways that align with who they are.
You need both. And when organizations invest in understanding the full picture — intrinsic traits, developed strengths and deeper aspirations — they unlock something qualitatively different from engagement. They activate potential.
three levels, one break
When people lose that connection, upward or inward, most of them do not quit. Most of them do not complain. The few who do complain are the ones we notice, because loudness is easy to manage. You can have a conversation with someone who is loudly struggling.
The break in connection does not look the same everywhere.
At the individual level, it shows up as burnout. Christina Maslach's Areas of Worklife model identifies the values mismatch, the moment a person's work stops aligning with what they believe matters, as one of the deepest drivers of burnout. The moment they stop asking, “How do I do this well?” and start asking, “What do I have to do to get through the day?”
Bailey and Madden's research confirms that meaningfulness is fragile and episodic: It comes and goes, depends heavily on how people are treated and is felt more in reflection than in the moment. When it is stripped away by poor management or by role redesign that removes the pieces that mattered, the exhaustion that follows is a symptom. The disconnection is the cause.
At the team level, it shows up as silence. The half-formed idea stays unsaid. The problem gets noticed but not named. The collective brilliance, the activation of cognitive diversity through psychological safety, cannot happen in a team that has quietly contracted. Amy Edmondson's foundational research showed that the highest-performing teams report the most errors, not the fewest, because they feel safe enough to surface them. When the conditions for collective brilliance are absent, the team does not fail loudly. It narrows silently, until the leader looks back and wonders when they last heard a genuinely difficult idea from someone who did not have to offer it.
At the cultural level, it shows up as the quiet majority. Gallup finds that roughly 60% of the global workforce falls into the “not engaged” category — not loudly quitting, not visibly struggling, but psychologically unattached. They are putting in time but not energy. They are present but not committed.
Deloitte's research found that 56% of organizations design for business outcomes alone, with fewer than 40% designing for both business and human outcomes. The compounding cost of that gap is what Deloitte calls “culture debt.” When the connection between work and aspiration is never made real in the daily experience of a place, the organization drifts toward that quiet equilibrium. A slow, steady narrowing of the space in which people bring their whole selves.
the question that matters most
Do you know the people you are redesigning work around — their intrinsic traits, developed strengths and deeper aspirations?
That is not a survey question. In fact, it lives in conversations most organizations are not having: the deliberate, patient curiosity about who each person actually is, what energizes them and what they are ultimately reaching for.
The organizations that will define the next phase are the ones that understand that designing work and understanding people are two sides of one coin, and that joy is the signal telling you whether both sides are still alive.
Watch for the quiet signals. Draw the line to the moon. And find out, before the metrics tell you, whether the work still connects to the people who do it. That is the job now.
the design challenge
True human potential is activated when a person's intrinsic traits, developed strengths and deeper aspirations are aligned with the work they are asked to do, and when that work is connected to something they genuinely care about. That is a design challenge.
Randstad Advisory helps leaders understand what their people are built for — the traits that energize them, the strengths they’ve developed and the aspirations that drive long-term engagement. And, we help them connect daily tasks to a larger purpose, at every level, not just at the top. See where redesign can free capacity and where freed capacity can be intentionally reinvested — not just efficiently reallocated — so that human potential is activated rather than quietly eroded.
The questions worth starting with are not complicated: Do you know what your people find energizing, and is that still in the work you have designed for them? Can your people trace a line from what they do today to something they genuinely care about? And when you redesign a role, do you know which parts were most meaningful to the person doing it?
If you are not sure of the answers to those questions, that is the place to begin.