How Workplace Value Is Created and Interpreted

I was laid off this week, because engagement and workplace value are not the same as organizational dependency.

When I talk about engagement and workplace value, I think of it as two parts of one whole.

The first part is the work itself, the contributions, effort, and actions a professional brings into an organization. This part is about skills and abilities in motion. 

The second part is the value interpretation: how a team or department experiences those contributions as beneficial. How the work moves something forward. The role creates value and eventually more engagement as the environment provides feedback. This is where we tell people they’re safe.

Why Engagement Often Feels Like Protection

Then there is organizational dependency. This defines roles that are essential to the business outcomes and its core. 

Organizational dependency is separate from both engagement and workplace value. It answers a different question entirely: does the organization need this role to operate, today, not in theory, not aspirationally, but functionally?

What is difficult to accept as a workplace strategist and whose focus is engagement and workplace value, is that a person can be highly devoted, capable, and valued, and still occupy a role the organization is not dependent on. 

That is partially by design.

In my work, I’ve asked a different question before, “What happens when no one does a job at all?” That question assumes time, a slow erosion, invisible strain, the quiet accumulation of cost. Layoffs collapse the timeline, forcing a harder distinction between long-term value and short-term necessity, and that distinction is what most of our conversations about work still refuse to name: valuable work doesn’t equate to essential work.

The Question We Avoid Asking

And right about here, you might respond by saying, “Well, the goal is to become essential.”

But that response assumes that every role in an organization can, or should, directly tie to core business outcomes. That assumption is comforting and largely untrue. Hard work has become confused with necessity.

I’m aware this can sound bleak. Like standing in a tunnel without a clear exit yet. But this isn’t cynicism, nor an attempt at bringing you down, it’s a realistic examination of how businesses work. 

Over the last several years, waves of layoffs have exposed a pattern. As organizations grow and perform well, roles are duplicated. Responsibilities are spread. Purposeful silos are created. The business identifies critical roles in crisis and when those roles need to disappear unexpectedly because risk must be reduced. It’s about what is needed for the organization to make it through the next week.

That’s where my thinking has been sitting, “Is it possible to make every role organizationally dependent?” “Can we scale and create intense purpose behind every role?”

The sooner we examine roles through that lens, the less destabilizing these moments may be when they arrive. We’ve been interpreting value as insurance. Systems don’t operate that way.

So maybe the goal is to be valuable, and to understand the necessity of where you are. If your role disappeared tomorrow, what would break, immediately?