Drowning in data, starving for dialogue

The resignation letter was drafted and ready to send. It was the culmination of weeks of quiet frustration, a growing sense of being undervalued, and the slow, painful fading of a creative spark.

But it was never sent.

What stopped a top-performing employee from walking out the door wasn’t a counter-offer, a new perk, or a company-wide initiative. It was a single conversation—a conversation that almost didn’t happen because, according to our data, everything was fine.

In today’s leadership landscape, we’re armed with an arsenal of tools designed to measure the health of our organizations. Engagement dashboards, pulse surveys, and performance metrics give us a constant stream of data. We can track sentiment, map network activity, and predict attrition risk with algorithms. Yet, for all this information, many of us are flying blind. We’re drowning in data but starved for the one thing that truly builds culture and retains talent: genuine human dialogue.

This is the story of how I learned that the most critical metrics are the ones that never show up on a spreadsheet.

The Illusion of the Green Dashboard

For years, the promise of HR tech has been to give us an objective, real-time view of our workforce. The annual engagement survey, once our only window into employee morale, now feels archaic. Why wait a year to find out you have a problem when a dashboard can flash red today?

But this reliance on quantitative data has created a dangerous blind spot. These tools are brilliant at measuring the what, but they often fail to capture the why.

They are Lagging Indicators: An annual survey doesn’t tell you about the problem you have now; it tells you about the damage that was done three months ago. By the time the results are in, your best people may have already updated their resumes.

They Lack Context: A dip in a team’s score might tell you they’re unhappy, but it won’t tell you it’s because a key project was de-prioritized without explanation, or that their manager is so burned out they’ve become a bottleneck.

They Create a False Sense of Security: This is the most dangerous trap of all. When the dashboard is green, it’s easy to assume all is well. We tick the box on “people management” and move on to the next fire, missing the subtle, human signals that a key team member is slowly drifting away.

As Gallup consistently reports, manager engagement is a critical factor, and it’s been plummeting. When managers disengage, their teams follow. This is a silent epidemic that a traffic-light dashboard simply cannot convey. It’s a crisis of connection, not a deficit of data points. And I almost paid the price for it.

The Month the Silence Became Deafening

In a previous business, my Head of Content was the creative and cultural engine of our team. Her Slack channels were a constant source of innovation. She was the one connecting disparate ideas, sparking new discussions, and pushing everyone to do their best work. Her energy was infectious.

Then, one month, it stopped.

The change was subtle at first. Then it became undeniable.

The Digital Disappearance: Her camera, once always on, was now permanently off. She was present in meetings, but her voice was gone, replaced by the silence of the mute button.

The Productivity Paradox: She was still delivering her work, but the proactive spark was gone. The stream of new ideas, late-night thoughts, and “what if” questions had dried up completely.

The Unseen Signals: Her use of sick days began to climb. Emails went unanswered for longer.

I looked at our engagement dashboard. Bright green. ✅

I checked in with my gut. Flashing red. 🔴

Every piece of data I had told me things were fine. But my intuition—the oldest leadership tool in the world—was screaming that they weren’t. So, I scrapped the spreadsheet and did something radically simple: I asked her to go for a coffee walk. No agenda. No metrics. Just air.

For the first twenty minutes, we talked about everything and nothing. Then, as we walked, she said it.

“You stopped inviting me to the leadership meetings. I feel shut out.”

She was right. In a recent reshuffle of our meeting cadence, I had inadvertently dropped her from a key weekly sync. It wasn’t malice; it was over-optimisation. A blind spot. But the impact was profound. To her, it wasn’t just a missed meeting; it was a message that her strategic voice was no longer valued. She felt demoted without a title change, and the passion she had for her work was extinguished.

The fix wasn’t a performance improvement plan or a company-wide initiative. It was an apology. A conversation. A quick calendar correction to ensure she had her rightful seat at the table.

Two meetings later, she was back. The flood of ideas returned. The creative energy was palpable. The resignation letter she later told me she’d been drafting stayed in a folder, unseen.

The ROI of a Real Conversation

The cost to replace a senior team member can be anywhere from one to two times their annual salary. The cost of that coffee? A few dollars. The cost of that conversation? A moment of vulnerability and the humility to admit a mistake.

This experience crystalized a fundamental truth for me: the most important signals of disengagement are often qualitative, not quantitative. They are the subtle shifts in human behaviour that precede the decision to leave.

The real challenge, of course, is scale. It’s one thing to have this intuition in a team of ten. How do you do it in a company of a hundred, or a thousand? How do you equip hundreds of managers, all time-poor and overloaded, to notice the quiet employee in the corner of their Zoom screen?

This is the problem we’ve become obsessed with at Hoogly. We believe the answer isn’t to build better dashboards, but to build tools that foster better dialogue. The future of AI in management isn’t to replace the leader’s gut feeling, but to augment it—to act as an empathetic co-pilot.

We’re building AI that helps leaders notice the silences. It’s designed to gently nudge a manager when a team member’s communication patterns change, prompting them to check in before it shows up as a red flag on a survey. It’s about using technology not to track people, but to help us care for them more effectively. It’s about making sure the coffee walk happens before the resignation letter is even written.

Ultimately, leadership isn’t about interpreting data; it’s about connecting with people. Our dashboards can tell us what has happened, but only our humanity can change what happens next.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. What are the “off-dashboard” signals you’ve learned to watch for? How have you brought someone back from the brink of disengagement?