Insight
What is human agency at work, and why should HR care?
Someone can be engaged, trusted and successful in their role with no clear direction of their own. What human agency means at work, and why it deserves a place in HR's thinking.
An employee can be highly engaged, perform well and meet every objective agreed with their manager, yet have little idea what they want from the next five years of their career. Another may be fully capable of moving into management and have no wish to. A third may be learning new skills in order to change profession, while their current performance gives no cause for concern.
The three situations share one feature. Knowing how someone is performing does not tell you how they are directing their life.
For more than two decades, I have worked with strategy across governments, multilateral institutions, higher education and the private sector. One thing has consistently struck me: organisations devote considerable effort to planning their future, defining direction, setting objectives and reviewing progress. Yet the people within those organisations rarely apply the same discipline to planning their own lives.
That contrast is one of the reasons I created Zeno Life Plan, and why I believe human agency deserves greater attention from HR leaders.
A definition
What human agency means
Human agency is a person's capacity to direct their own life. Albert Bandura described it as "the capacity to exercise control over the nature and quality of one's life", built on intention, forethought, self-regulation and self-reflection.1 At work — employee agency, or agency in the workplace — that capacity has several connected parts: forming intentions, weighing the choices actually available, deciding, and acting on the decision. It also means recognising constraints. Agency does not mean that anyone can achieve anything, whatever their circumstances.
The phrase has a second, narrower sense worth setting aside. In AI governance, human agency means people staying in charge of machines, the first of seven requirements in the European Commission's guidelines for trustworthy AI.2 This essay is about the first sense: people directing their own lives.
Freedom and direction are different things. A person can have considerable freedom and little direction. Another can know exactly what they want and face real limits on pursuing it. Neither situation shows up in a question about whether they feel engaged.
The first distinction
Why agency is not engagement
Engagement remains an important concern. It describes people's relationship with their work and their organisation. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) recommends a mixed approach to understanding it: surveys give a representative view across the organisation, while qualitative methods such as focus groups give richer insight into why people feel as they do.3
But engagement and agency answer different questions. Engagement asks how someone relates to their current work. Agency asks whether they have considered where they want to go, and whether they can take meaningful steps towards it.
An employee who reports high satisfaction, values their colleagues and believes in the organisation may want to stay in the same role, move into leadership, change specialism or eventually leave the sector. Their survey answers will not say which. Equally, someone planning a career change is not necessarily disengaged: the decision may be a positive choice rather than a complaint. The earlier essay on engagement surveys looks at what surveys can and cannot tell an organisation.
The second distinction
Why agency is not unlimited autonomy
It is easy to turn agency into a fashionable word for independence. Autonomy concerns how much discretion someone has. Agency includes deciding what to do with the choices available, recognising limits and acting intentionally. A person with wide discretion over their working day can still be uncertain about their direction. A person in a highly structured role can still make deliberate decisions about what to learn and where to go next.
Autonomy still matters. Researchers working with self-determination theory find that meeting people's needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness at work supports motivation that people experience as their own.4 People also reshape their tasks and relationships, and with them the meaning they find in their work, which researchers call job crafting.5
Organisations cannot remove every constraint. Budgets, operations, professional standards and business priorities are real. The question is not whether employees can do whatever they wish, but whether they can make informed choices within their circumstances and pursue realistic next steps. A catalogue of training courses does not, by itself, give anyone agency. It becomes useful when the person knows what they want to learn, and why.
The case for HR
Why HR should care now
Most organisations have structures for development: performance conversations, learning programmes, career frameworks and succession plans. They serve legitimate purposes. The difficulty begins when a person's own direction is assumed rather than understood. Being suitable for a role does not establish an interest in it, and training aligned with a departmental priority may or may not support where the person wants to go.
The pressure on these decisions is rising. Employers surveyed by the World Economic Forum expect 39% of workers' core skills to change by 2030.6 That is a finding about the pace of change in skills. My own reading of it is this: when what to learn keeps shifting, people have to choose again and again where to go next, and no employer can make those choices for them.
There is evidence that structure helps. In an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) survey of adults in six countries who had used career guidance, those who received a personalised plan setting out steps towards their training or employment goals were 25% more likely to report improved employment prospects within six months.7 The OECD also notes that involving people in developing their own plan can motivate informed action. The finding is an association, based on what people reported, and it says nothing about any particular product, Zeno included. It does suggest that helping adults articulate their own direction is worth doing well.
Goal-setting research points the same way. Summarised across 35 years of studies, it finds that specific goals people commit to tend to work better than vague intentions.8
The scope
A whole life, not only a career
A career sits inside a wider life. An international assignment may depend on family circumstances. A change in working pattern may relate to study, health or a personal project. Financial security may matter more, for now, than promotion. These are ordinary features of adult life.
Organisations already understand this about themselves. Their strategic plans cover finance, people, operations and risk together, because each affects the others. A meaningful personal plan should recognise how the different areas of life influence one another.
None of this gives an employer the right to examine anyone's private life. Recognising that wider priorities exist is different from requiring people to disclose them. Keeping that boundary may be what allows people to think honestly about their direction at all.
For leaders
Questions for your leadership team
- In development conversations, do we distinguish what someone can do from what they want to do?
- Do we know what our people are voluntarily trying to learn, and what they want that learning to make possible?
- Can people decline a promotion, a move or a succession route without it being read as a lack of ambition?
- Where do development intentions stall, between the review conversation and the diary?
- Do people have anywhere private to think about their direction, and are we clear about what the organisation needs to know and what should remain theirs?
None of these requires abandoning performance management, engagement surveys or workforce planning. They recognise that those processes describe only part of a person's relationship with work.
Our approach
Where Zeno fits
Zeno Life Plan gives each person a structured method for their own direction, in four steps across seven areas of life:
- Fulfilment: what a fulfilled life looks like across seven life areas, and where they honestly stand today.
- Assets: what they want to own, to learn and to do.
- Objectives: turning that direction into objectives, activities and a practical next step, reviewed each week.
- Life Purpose: reading the plan back to find the recurring themes of growth, experience and contribution.
The result is a written Life Plan and a written Life Purpose that the person owns and keeps. The method does not tell anyone which aspirations are right. It gives them a way to organise their own thinking. One person may conclude that a professional qualification really matters to them. Another may conclude that the same qualification would take time and money better spent on a different priority. Both are progress in clarity.
The employer cannot read an individual's Life Plan. The Zeno Employer App is designed to show the organisation only aggregated patterns across many people, an approach we call Human Agency Intelligence and the subject of the next essay in this series. The privacy principles set out where the boundary sits.
Those patterns have limits, and they should be read with them. An expressed intention is not a guaranteed future action. A recorded commitment is not evidence of a psychological state. An aggregate pattern does not explain any one person's circumstances.
In conclusion
A more complete view of people at work
People can do excellent work without a complete Life Plan, and no method removes uncertainty. The purpose of structured planning is not to eliminate uncertainty but to help people respond to it with a clearer view of their priorities and possibilities.
Engagement helps explain someone's relationship with their current work. Performance management assesses their contribution. Workforce planning identifies future capability needs. Human agency adds a further question: does the person have a meaningful direction of their own?
It is a question organisations have good reason to take seriously, and one that people should remain free to answer for themselves.
Before you ask
Common questions
What is human agency in the workplace?
It is the capacity to form intentions, make choices and act on them within real circumstances and constraints. At work, it covers decisions about development, learning, career direction and how work fits with the rest of a person's life.
How is human agency different from employee engagement?
Engagement describes people's relationship with their work and organisation. Agency describes their capacity to set and pursue a direction of their own. Both matter, but a highly engaged employee does not necessarily have clear personal or career objectives.
Does supporting agency mean unlimited autonomy, or less structure?
No. Agency operates within practical constraints, and the right structure can help people exercise it: a clear method, specific commitments and regular review. What changes is who decides the direction: the person, not the organisation.
Can an employer measure human agency?
An employer should not try to score any individual's agency. Carefully defined indicators about planning and recorded action, shown only in aggregate, can inform an organisation. How they are interpreted, and the privacy safeguards around them, matter as much as the measurement.
Isn't a person's direction their own business rather than their employer's?
Yes, and the approach respects that. The plan belongs to the person. The organisation's part is to offer the method and the time, and it does not read individual plans.
Sources and further reading
- Bandura, A., Annual Review of Psychology, Social Cognitive Theory: An Agentic Perspective (2001): vol. 52, pp. 1 to 26, on agency as the capacity to exercise control over the nature and quality of one's life, with intentionality, forethought, self-reactiveness and self-reflectiveness as its core features
- High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence, European Commission, Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI (2019): 8 April 2019; the first of seven requirements is human agency and oversight
- CIPD, Employee engagement and motivation (factsheet) (2025): recommends a mixed approach: surveys for a representative organisation-wide view, qualitative methods such as focus groups for richer insight into why people feel as they do
- Deci, E. L., Olafsen, A. H., and Ryan, R. M., Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, Self-Determination Theory in Work Organizations: The State of a Science (2017): vol. 4, pp. 19 to 43, a review of research on autonomy, competence and relatedness at work and autonomous motivation
- Wrzesniewski, A., and Dutton, J. E., Academy of Management Review, Crafting a Job: Revisioning Employees as Active Crafters of Their Work (2001): 26(2), pp. 179 to 201, on how people actively shape the tasks, relationships and meaning of their work
- World Economic Forum, The Future of Jobs Report 2025 (2025): employers expect 39% of workers' core skills to change by 2030, down from 44% in the 2023 edition; based on more than 1,000 employers representing over 14 million workers
- OECD, Getting Skills Right, Career Guidance for Adults in a Changing World of Work, chapter 3: Quality and impact (2021): 2020 Survey of Career Guidance for Adults (Chile, France, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, United States; adults who used guidance in the previous five years). Receiving a personalised career development roadmap is associated with a 25% higher likelihood of improved employment prospects within six months (self-reported, with controls)
- Locke, E. A., and Latham, G. P., American Psychologist, Building a Practically Useful Theory of Goal Setting and Task Motivation (2002): 57(9), pp. 705 to 717, on why specific goals people commit to outperform vague intentions such as doing one's best
Author
Emerson Resende
Founder of Zeno Life Plan
Published
Emerson is the creator of the Zeno Life Plan methodology, with more than two decades of strategy experience across governments, multilateral institutions, higher education and the private sector. The methodology draws on Stoicism, Vipassana, behavioural science and strategic planning. More about Zeno Life Plan and its founder.
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