The Fascination Factor.
US employee engagement fell to 31% in Gallup's 2024 data, the lowest level in a decade. Globally it's 21%. Gallup put the cost of that disengagement at $9.6 trillion a year in lost productivity. Every HR team in the country has a slide about it, and almost none of them have fixed it, because they're solving the wrong problem. That argument sits at the center of The Fascination Factor, a new book by organizational psychologist André Martin and longtime advertising creative director Mark Fitzloff, previewed in the journal associated with Duke Corporate Education
Ping-pong tables and mission statements treat disengagement like a satisfaction gap: raise the score, add a perk, repeat. Free lunch buys goodwill for about a quarter. A wellness stipend buys a little more. None of it buys the thing companies actually need, which is people who show up wanting to know what happens next. Martin and Fitzloff's case is that the real driver is fascination, the same pull that makes a great ad impossible to scroll past, applied to the company itself rather than satisfaction.
The word itself used to mean something more literal. For centuries, "fascination" described an actual spell, a hold placed on the senses that a person couldn't will their way out of. Neuroscience has since given it a less mystical translation: fascination is what happens when novelty, intrigue, and attraction combine into a pull toward an idea that doesn't let go. People are wired for it from infancy. What's changed is that most companies have engineered it out of the workplace by accident, in the name of consistency and process.
Fascination, according to the book, is built from four specific things, not a mood and not something free-floating, and losing any one of them collapses the whole structure. Curiosity is the desire to keep exploring: a company that has already explained itself completely has nothing left to discover, and nothing left to discover gets boring fast. Connection is the sense of belonging to something larger than an individual task list, the reason a shared origin story or a shared rival does more for a team than a values poster ever will. Challenge is a problem hard enough to keep someone's attention, not busywork, but a real puzzle worth solving, the kind that makes a Tuesday feel different from the Tuesday before it. Continuity is the sense that the story is still being written, and that an employee is a character in it rather than a bystander watching it happen to other people.
Take away curiosity and there's nothing left to wonder about. Take away connection and people go through the motions alone. Take away challenge and the job gets boring on schedule. Take away continuity and every high gets erased by the next low.
Most companies interested in fixing engagement start by asking employees what they want, then handing back some version of the answer: more flexibility, more recognition, more time off. All reasonable. None of it addresses fascination. Fascination is a response to something specific and real, not a want that shows up on a survey result, and no company has ever surveyed its way into it. Building something worth being curious about is a different job entirely than running an engagement survey and acting on the results.
The book's case tracks with something advertising has always known. A campaign that works is the one that makes a familiar product feel like it still has something left to say, not the one with the cleverest line. The companies that stay interesting decades in, the ones nobody has to be talked into joining, didn't get there with a tagline. They got there because the story kept moving and the people inside it were characters in it, not spectators watching a quarterly earnings call.
Most leadership advice treats engagement like a satisfaction score: fix the complaints, raise the number, move on. That's a different problem than the one companies are actually facing. Satisfaction measures whether people are comfortable. Fascination measures whether they're paying attention. A workplace can be perfectly comfortable and still be somewhere nobody thinks about after 6 p.m., and comfort has never once made anyone stay for the right reasons.
There's a management-level version of this too. Managers who can only offer a raise or a title change are stuck competing on the one axis every competitor can match. Managers who can point to a real, specific, ongoing story the team is part of are competing on an axis almost nobody else bothers to build. It's the same reason a distinctive brand beats a generic one even when the generic one spends more on media, not some motivational trick.
Get it right, and it compounds. Fascinated employees don't just stay longer, they recruit for other people without being asked, because a good story is the easiest thing in the world to repeat. Gallup has already put a number on the payoff: teams with real engagement outperform their peers on profitability by 23%, and that edge compounds the longer the culture holds intact.
The uncomfortable part for most leaders: fascination can't be delegated to a communications team, and it can't be manufactured at an offsite. It has to be true, and it has to be maintained the way a brand is maintained: deliberately, one contradiction and one quirk at a time, by someone willing to tell the honest version of the story instead of the flattering one.
Perks are furniture. You can match a competitor's salary. You cannot match their story.
