When employees begin to underperform, lose enthusiasm, or quietly “check out,” most organizations assume the issue lies with the individual. Maybe they’re not a fit for the culture. Maybe they’ve lost motivation. Maybe it’s time for “a tough conversation.”
But what if the problem isn’t the person at all?
What if it’s the environment they’re working in?
When Good People Stop Thriving
Today’s workplaces are riddled with what experts are calling “job hugging” —employees who are unhappy, disengaged, or burned out, yet choose to stay put, mostly out of fear of leaving a steady role in a tumultuous job market.
According to Gallup, only 31% of U.S. employees are engaged at work, and that disengagement costs businesses an estimated $8.8 trillion globally in lost productivity each year. Meanwhile, research from BambooHR shows that employee happiness has fallen to its lowest point since 2020.
That means millions of people are staying in jobs that no longer energize them—not because they’re lazy or disloyal, but because they feel trapped. They don’t want to leave; they just can’t thrive where they are.
This kind of “stay-but-disengage” dynamic has enormous consequences. It saps innovation, erodes trust, and creates a culture of quiet complacency that can spread like a virus. The problem isn’t always in the individual—it could be in the system.
The Missing Diagnostic: Measuring the Environment
That’s where the AQai Adaptability Assessment—specifically the Environment dimension—becomes invaluable.
Adaptability Intelligence (AQ) looks at three dimensions of change readiness: Ability (how we adapt), Character (why we adapt), and Environment (when and to what degree we adapt).
The Environment dimension examines the external factors that influence Adaptability. It helps leaders understand the context employees operate in—and whether that context is helping them grow or quietly crushing their capacity to do so.
In other words, it reveals when your organization might be the problem.
“When employees underperform, most leaders look at behavior first—what the individual is doing wrong,” said Krista Sheets, CEO of Competitive Edge, Inc. and an expert in assessing organizational adaptability. “But what they don’t realize is that the Environment can suppress or unlock those behaviors. You can’t expect high Adaptability Intelligence in a low-Adaptability environment.”
Here’s how each of the five Environment subdimensions can either fuel adaptability, or suffocate it:
Company Support
Do employees feel their organization truly values their contributions and well-being?
When people feel seen and supported, they’re much more likely to stretch, experiment, and adapt to change. But when they feel like just a number—replaceable and undervalued—they disengage. These are your “job huggers”: present in body but absent in spirit.
High company support environments are characterized by trust, transparency, and appreciation. Low ones are marked by silence, skepticism, and fear of being expendable.
The AQai Assessment can reveal how your employees perceive the level of support your company provides.
Emotional Health
How emotionally safe is your culture?
Teams in environments with a high level of psychological or emotional safety show higher creativity, better collaboration, and more resilience during change. But when the culture tolerates, or even generates, chronic stress or burnout, Adaptability plummets. Employees lose bandwidth for innovation because all their energy goes to survival.
Gallup data shows that stress and worry are the leading drivers of disengagement. Without emotional well-being, even the best talent will eventually falter.
The AQai assessment can help you understand whether your employees feel emotionally supported, and to what degree, and illuminate some opportunities for you to provide better support.
Team Support
Does the team have each other’s backs—or are people keeping their heads down?
When people feel safe to ask questions, challenge assumptions, and offer ideas, they adapt faster and perform better. But when they fear being penalized for mistakes or “rocking the boat,” they stop taking initiative. That perceived loss of psychological safety kills Adaptability at the source. The AQai Assessment can pinpoint teams operating under “low Team Support” conditions, giving leaders the data they need to address the situation before it drives job hugging or attrition.
Work Environment
Do your systems, structures, and processes support learning and experimentation or punish it?
A growth-oriented environment provides tools and flexibility for trying new approaches. It gives teams the freedom to push boundaries and not fear failure. A stagnant one rewards conformity and risk avoidance, which can stymie individual and organizational performance.
If your team avoids change because they’ve learned it’s unsafe to fail, that’s not a people problem—it’s an organizational problem. The AQai Assessment helps leaders quantify this “climate of adaptability” so they can strengthen it intentionally.
Work Stress
Every workplace has stress, but stress can be positive or negative. The question is, does the stress your employees feel encourage them to stretch or strangle their initiative?
Healthy stress fuels motivation and innovation. It encourages people to strive for more, to grow in character and skill and push outside their comfort zone in a way that makes them feel energized. Chronic or chaotic stress depletes energy and leads to burnout. On the other hand, too little stress breeds apathy and stagnation.
“It’s a bit like Goldilocks—the stress has to feel ‘just right’ for each individual in order for them to perform well,” Sheets says. “But when you get it right, the results can be transformative.”
Data from the AQai Environment assessment can reveal whether stress levels are optimized for performance or tipping into dysfunction for each individual and the organization as a whole.
When the System Undermines the Self
How does this low-Adaptability state manifest?
- A high-Adaptability employee with strong resilience and growth mindset might thrive in a supportive, high-trust culture, but struggle in one where change is constant but communication is absent.
- A low-stress-tolerant employee can be a top performer if workload expectations are realistic, but disengage quickly if forced to run on adrenaline too long.
- A creative innovator may lose motivation in an environment that prizes consistency and compliance over experimentation.
In each case, the individual’s Adaptability potential hasn’t changed. The environment has.
The “It’s Not You, It’s Me” Moment
To find a way out of this situation, organizations need to have their own, “it’s not you, it’s me” reckoning.
If turnover is rising, job hugging is prevalent, engagement scores are slipping, or innovation is stalling, it’s not enough to swap out team members or throw another engagement program at the problem. Leaders must examine the context their people are working in.
The AQai Adaptability Assessment makes that possible by evaluating the Environment and translating employees’ perceptions of support, health, and workload into tangible data. It gives organizations a mirror to see individuals in the context of their working environment—and the tools to build a roadmap—to repair the conditions driving disengagement.
Here are some hypothetical examples of what that can look like in action:
- An overworked marketing team might score the organization high on Work Stress and low on Emotional Health because they’re overwhelmed with constantly putting out fires. With the information from these AQ results, leaders can shift from reactive to proactive mode. For example, by planning organized quarterly sprints to knock out campaigns instead of treating everything as an emergency, teams can improve output while reducing the anxiety and late nights.
- A manufacturing firm that sees low Team Support scores among plant managers might discover on follow-up that they feel left on their own too often with too little guidance from upper management. Now that the assessment has surfaced the issue, leaders can implement coaching and peer mentorship to rebuild trust, communication, and rapport, counteracting the factors that erode retention.
- Consider a tech startup that prides itself on its “move fast” culture. But low Company Support and Work Environment scores indicate that something isn’t clicking. Now that the company knows where to look, it discovers that it’s been inadvertently punishing failure and ironically hindering innovation. To resolve that, management could adopt a “fail fast, learn faster” approach mindful of psychological safety that encourages its team to take calculated risks to foster innovation.
As you can see, these aren’t personality fixes. They’re environmental ones, and in most cases entirely within the control of the organization.
Adaptability Is an Organizational Trait
Research from McKinsey and Accenture shows that Adaptability is now one of the most critical predictors of long-term business success. Yet 90% of companies admit they struggle to pivot quickly.
Measuring Adaptability Intelligence at the organizational level—not just the individual—is how leaders close that gap. When the environment supports Adaptability, employees don’t just stay. They shine.
When people feel safe, supported, and challenged in healthy ways, the organization stops being the problem and starts being the reason they stay.
Before assuming your people aren’t a good fit, ask whether your environment is. With the AQai Adaptability Assessment, you can finally separate the person from the environment—and find a pathway to fix what’s really holding your organization back.
Ready to benchmark how well your Environment supports Adaptability? The AQai Adaptability Assessment can reveal the factors that fuel engagement, resilience, and lasting performance.
Give us a call to get started today!