Employee engagement metrics have become prominent instruments for representing workforce motivation, commitment, and organizational vitality. Their usefulness, however, can be overstated when engagement scores are treated as sufficient evidence of sustainable work. This Critical Viewpoint Article argues that engagement measurement may leave important energetic, affective, temporal, and governance dimensions outside the field of organizational visibility. It introduces Employee Energy Extraction as a proposed analytic category describing the organizational capture of cognitive, emotional, temporal, and self-regulatory effort when the costs and recovery requirements of that effort are incompletely represented. Building from evidence on engagement, job demands and resources, recovery, emotional labor, workload, people analytics, and algorithmic work design, the article distinguishes valid measurement of engagement from valid inference about employee sustainability. The central proposed contribution is an Ethical Measurement Boundary Framework, developed later in the article, that treats construct correspondence, energetic and affective completeness, temporal and recovery adequacy, level and inference discipline, and legitimate use as separable decision boundaries. The argument does not assume that demanding work is inherently extractive, that engagement is harmful, or that analytics systems necessarily conceal employee costs. Instead, it specifies conditions under which apparently positive indicators may be informationally incomplete. The article therefore advances a governance-oriented critique of measurement sufficiency and proposes multidomain indicators as a more defensible basis for evaluating sustainable work, while emphasizing that the framework requires empirical testing and does not constitute a validated causal model or universal organizational prescription.
