Commitment is ink, not henna: what makes it last?

In the business world, most engagement initiatives are short-lived, fading away within a season like henna tattoos. These initiatives, such as town hall meetings, values posters, new snacks, and surveys, appear convincing for a short time but fade away quickly, just like henna. Real commitment, on the other hand, is like ink that has to be chosen deliberately and lived with, even when it's more convenient to look away.

Pew Research found that 32% of American adults have at least one tattoo, and surprisingly, only 24% regret the decision. This suggests that irreversible choices made in a small room with a stranger tend to be less regretted than the average corporate town hall. This is not a coincidence, but rather a reflection of the difference between ink and henna.

Psychologists have long understood that irreversible choices lead the mind to justify them, defend them, identify with them, and integrate them into our sense of self. In contrast, reversible choices remain provisional. This distinction matters for leaders who wonder how much of their "engagement" is built to last and how much is designed to be easily discarded.

Most workplace engagement is henna – applied for effect and changing nothing about how people are treated after a week. Real commitment behaves like ink, requiring deliberate choice, short-term cost, and public living with it, even on easier days. A leader who listens to concerns and acts on them applies ink, while one who sidelines the next person who raises concerns applies henna.

The difference between ink and henna is not visible in the initial announcement but becomes apparent three months later when it would have been easier to erase. The same test applies to customers as well as employees. A loyalty scheme is henna if its benefits evaporate when a customer becomes commercially inconvenient, while it is ink if it holds when it actually costs the company something to keep the promise.

To drive commitment, people need to see their effort visibly changing something that matters, receive specific recognition, continue learning, and belong to something smaller than the whole organization. These factors do not require a budget line; they cost a leader's willingness to apply them consistently, even when it would be easier not to.

Despite the obvious benefits, most organizations continue to opt for henna, which is safer, easily reversible, and doesn't require leaders to change their own behavior first. This safer choice is now evident in the data, with Gallup's latest State of the Global Workplace report showing that global employee engagement is at just 20%, marking a second consecutive annual decline. The cost of disengagement to the world economy is estimated at $10 trillion, or about 9% of global GDP.

One of the subtler symptoms of disengagement is "quiet cracking," where employees privately stop believing the organization is going anywhere they want to follow. This disengagement looks and feels like commitment from the outside, but it does not keep on its own.

For leaders, the choice is clear: investing in engagement is not a matter of whether, but which kind of engagement they are building. Henna is cheaper, faster, and reversible, but it never asks anything of leaders or employees. Ink, on the other hand, costs more upfront in terms of consistency rather than money, but it is the only kind that leaves a lasting impact.