Your Company Doesn’t Want You Engaged — They Want You Compliant
And they’ve stopped even pretending otherwise.
They can keep their engagement surveys.
They can keep the “listening sessions.”
They can keep the free pizza, branded mugs, and email blasts about “employee appreciation month.”
Because none of that means anything when leadership is publicly bragging about how replaceable you are.
The Mask Is Off
They used to at least pretend engagement mattered. Now? They’re saying the quiet part out loud:
Nvidia — the same company with shiny PR about innovation — just cut a deal telling Trump: “Sure, we’ll pay the feds 15% of our China sales to play ball.” That’s not leadership. That’s corporate capitulation.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told investors generative AI will “reduce our total corporate workforce.” Translation: fewer humans, same work, fatter margins.
Elijah Clark, AI consultant and startup CEO, literally said: “AI doesn’t go on strike. It doesn’t ask for a pay raise.” He’s “extremely excited” to fire humans in favor of tireless code.
And while all of this is happening? CEO-to-worker pay is now ~290-to-1, up from just 21-to-1 in 1965. That’s not “market value.” That’s contempt, measured in dollars.
Engagement vs. Obedience
Here’s the thing HR will never put in a slide deck:
The C-suite doesn’t want engagement. They want obedience.
Engagement means curiosity, ideas, and the occasional “no” when a decision is wrong.
Obedience means you’ll keep doing more with less, nod in meetings, and smile in the company photo while they quietly plan your replacement.
This isn’t accidental disengagement. It’s engineered compliance.
And they’ve stopped hiding it.
This Isn’t Theory — It’s Happening Right Now
A friend of mine shared this on LinkedIn recently:
Her company laid off over 100 people in one day.
HR — including her and her one direct report — were drafted to deliver the news, escort people out, and hold their grief.
All day. From 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Then, at the end of the day, her direct report was called in and laid off, without her knowledge.
Imagine giving your entire day to helping people process losing their jobs — only to be discarded yourself.
This isn’t an anomaly. It’s the extraction playbook.
The Great She-Exit
Since January, a net 338,000 women have left the U.S. labor force — while 183,000 men joined it.
That’s not burnout. That’s an exit strategy.
And here’s the part the headlines smooth over: not every woman had the privilege of choosing to walk.
Mass layoffs in tech and corporate sectors disproportionately hit women — and Black women have been among the hardest hit, often being the first cut when companies “tighten headcount” despite holding critical roles. Some were pushed out quietly under the guise of restructuring; others were handed impossible workloads and performance targets designed to push them out without severance.
And before anyone tries to rebrand this as “a return to traditional values” — no.
The women leaving aren’t quietly retreating into domestic life.
They’re taking severance checks and corporate trauma and turning them into seed funding for their own ventures.
They’re starting consultancies. Launching product companies. Building creative studios.
Nearly half of new businesses in 2024 were started by women — a 69% jump since 2019 — and women over 40 are one of the fastest-growing entrepreneur groups in the U.S.
Some left because they’d had enough. Some left because they were pushed.
But together, they’re building something leadership can’t control.
This Has Been Decades in the Making
This didn’t start with AI.
It started with a business model that treated people as infinitely replaceable, then dressed it up with just enough perks to keep us from bolting en masse.
The last few years have just stripped away the illusion:
Pandemic layoffs followed by record profits.
“We’re a family” until you’re a cost center.
DEI as marketing copy, not as a measurable priority.
They’ve shown us exactly who they are — and for once, people are believing them.
This Is What a Credibility Crisis Looks Like
Gallup’s numbers back it up: best-practice orgs can hit ~70% engagement because their leaders actually live the values they preach. The rest of the U.S.? Around 30% — and sliding.
The gap isn’t about perks, benefits, or engagement surveys. It’s about credibility.
And no, HR can’t fix that while the people at the top are proving, in public, that they’d replace every one of us with code if it meant juicing the stock price another 2%.
The Rebellion Is Already Underway
They may have engineered compliance inside the walls, but they can’t stop what’s happening outside of them.
The women leaving aren’t just walking away from a paycheck — they’re walking toward something of their own.
They’re building new models of leadership. Ones where trust isn’t a PR strategy and engagement isn’t a metric to manipulate.
The future isn’t being built in the boardroom.It’s being built by the people they thought were disposable.
And that? That’s the part they should be afraid of.
