The engagement trap: Becoming irreplaceable in the age of AI

The future of work isn’t waiting for better workplaces. It’s waiting for better contributors, writes Grant Wyatt.

You’re in your manager’s office, resignation letter in hand, heart racing. You say the line you’ve rehearsed for months: “I quit.” You grab your pot plant and stride out like a movie hero.

Three months later, you’re at a new desk. Same emails. Same politics. Same frustrations. The only thing that changed was the Wi-Fi password.

If that fantasy resonates, you’re not alone. Across the world, nearly eight in 10 employees aren’t engaged at work. That’s a third of your life doing something you don’t like. And before you imagine your manager smugly loving their time in the office, know that seven in 10 managers aren’t engaged either. They just have to hide it better.

In response, organisations are bending over backwards, pouring billions into wellness programs, engagement platforms, and perks. Yet, the numbers keep getting worse.

The dependency cycle

The obsession with mending engagement has created a dependency loop: Workers expect leaders to fix culture; leaders wait for survey scores to tell them what to fix. They respond with a new purpose statement, another campaign or an alignment workshop, trying to engineer happiness while employees wait for a feeling no leader can supply.

Staff sit at their desks, cynical and exhausted from trying to extract purpose from their position description. Everyone hoping the next program will be the one that finally sparks engagement, but it never does. The more workplaces try to manufacture meaning, the more incomplete people feel when it doesn’t.

The behaviours then go underground. Employees nod along, write the emails, give a thumbs-up to the purpose, and quietly disconnect, sneaking an eye roll to their work bestie, and stretching breaks just to get through the week and bank the next pay. It feels fake, because it is.

We’ve been conditioned to think engagement must trickle down from the top. If leaders were better, benefits were bigger, or culture was brighter, then we’d feel fulfilled.

Expectations have ballooned so much that employment is now treated like a lifestyle contract. People expect not only fair pay but purpose, wellbeing, flexibility, and emotional nourishment. At the same time, the old currencies of work like loyalty, reliability, and a constructive attitude have diminished, widening the gap between what people expect from work and what they contribute to it.

So, if we’ve never had more flexibility and perks, why do we still resent work so much?

Because engagement isn’t handed down from the boardroom; it’s built from the inside out. While leadership and environment matter, your engagement is yours to own. That means you can change jobs, but if you don’t change, the misery will follow you.

AI: The ultimate magnifier

We need this conversation now more than ever because a new catalyst has arrived: artificial Intelligence, making the impact of disengagement impossible to hide.

AI now handles the mundane work we’ve long complained about, from repetitive emails to admin churn and producing corporate jargon, and in many cases, it does it better than we can. This forces a confronting question: What’s left for you? What remains is the part that depends on you giving a damn. Engagement is the entry point to the work AI can’t touch: creative problem solving, critical thinking and genuine value creation.

AI is a magnifier. It amplifies whatever you bring. If you’re curious and willing to learn, it’s rocket fuel. If you resist change, it accelerates your irrelevance. AI won’t replace people so much as expose them. The engaged gain leverage. The disengaged get left behind. No company will continue paying someone who is checked out or doing the bare minimum when technology can perform without complaint.

This is a call to move past the fear of being replaced and become someone irreplaceable. That shift requires three capabilities no technology can automate: clarity, capability, and character.

The new engagement triad

1. Clarity: know what matters

Leaders must set direction, remove barriers, ensure fairness and safety, and recognise real contribution – these are the basics of a healthy workplace. But leaders should also stop trying to turn work into lifestyle centres. We don’t need another wellbeing pillar trying to merge personal life into work. Pay people properly, let them do meaningful work, and let them go home.

Once those fundamentals are in place, engagement depends on ownership at an individual level. When benefits outpace contribution, entitlement creeps in. True engagement emerges when responsibility shifts from organisations doing more to individuals contributing more.

And ownership starts with clarity. The fastest path to burnout isn’t always being busy; feeling useless or unsure whether your work matters can do it just as fast. Every task you complete should link to a tangible outcome, such as revenue, growth, safety, customer satisfaction, or a personal intention. If you can’t see that link, the task or your approach needs rethinking. Ask: Who benefits from my work today, and how will I know? Where clarity meets accountability, engagement follows.

Clarity matters even more in a digital workplace where contribution is increasingly transparent and visible. This cuts both ways – it protects employees from unreasonable demands but also exposes effort that doesn’t match impact.

The new standard is simple: fair expectations for fair contribution.

2. Capability: build what AI can’t

Few things drain engagement more than the sense that you’re not moving forward. The era when your development relied primarily on your manager’s investment is over. Anyone with internet access now has more learning resources available than at any point in history.

AI literacy has become a non-negotiable skill to possess. You don’t need to become a coder, but you do need to know how to prompt effectively, interpret output critically, and build smarter workflows.

Then, double down on what remains uniquely human: judgement, empathy, persuasive communication, creativity, and influence. Use AI as a thought partner, but resist the copy-paste sameness it tempts us towards. Originality now lives in thinking and creating beyond the model.

3. Character: who you are when it’s hard

Character is the standard you hold when no one is watching. It shows in how you handle pressure, ambiguity and responsibility. It’s choosing ownership over blame, usefulness over cynicism and steadiness over drama. It’s telling the truth even when it’s uncomfortable and having the courage to say no when you should. Integrity is what earns trust, and trust is something AI can’t replicate.

For organisations, this means promoting character first. We often expect managers to be superheroes: part coach, part psychologist, and part strategist, all while delivering business results. But in the real world, where managers are imperfect humans, at a minimum, they must be respectful, clear, fair, and appreciative of others’ efforts. Those who can’t meet that standard, regardless of tenure or technical skill, need to move out of the role or out of your business.

Technology can perform tasks, but it can’t embody values.

From expecting to becoming

We can keep stacking wellbeing perks like sandbags against dissatisfaction, but without discipline or ownership, they only create fragility.

The engagement triad of clarity, capability, and character shifts focus back to what has always been yours: your effort, your growth, your integrity. When these three align, fulfilment stops being something you chase and becomes something you generate. Purpose becomes a by-product of how you show up, not a condition you demand.

Freedom arrives when your engagement no longer depends on whether your organisation gets every decision right, but on your choice to stay relevant, accountable, and growing amid uncertainty.

The future of work isn’t waiting for better workplaces. It’s waiting for better contributors. Those who bring value that no machine can and who shape their careers through capability and character, not circumstance.

Grant Wyatt is the head of human resources at Ensign Laboratories.