Your engagement survey is a translation problem
The results land. The exec team gathers round the slides. Someone reads out the lowest-scoring lines, and there’s a slightly defensive silence.
“Communication is poor.” “I don’t feel valued.” “My manager doesn’t listen.” “I can’t see a future here.”
Then the action plan arrives:
- A monthly newsletter.
- A recognition scheme.
- A suggestion box, digital this time.
- A careers page on the intranet.
Twelve months later, the scores have barely moved. Everyone is a little more cynical about the survey.
If you work in HR, you’ve probably sat in that meeting. Here’s what might be going on.
Survey lines are symptoms, not diagnoses
An engagement survey gives people a fixed set of words to describe how work feels. So they pick the closest one available. “Communication” is a very wide bucket. So is “valued”.
Take those words literally and you get literal fixes: more communication, more recognition, more channels. But the score was rarely about the literal thing. It was about something more specific that the survey never had a box for.
The job isn’t to answer the line. It’s to translate it.
Four common translations
“I don’t feel valued.” This is rarely a request for an award scheme. More often it means nobody notices the work I do day to day. Recognition that lands is small, specific and frequent: a manager saying “that client email you sent yesterday was spot on.” It’s a habit managers can learn, and very few have been taught it. By the time it shows up in the survey, the gap has usually been there for months.
“Communication is poor.” This almost never means “I need more emails.” It usually means one of three things. I find out about decisions after they’re made. Nobody explains why. Or I’m told things, but never asked. That’s about involvement and context, not volume. Another newsletter adds to the noise without fixing any of them.
“My manager doesn’t listen.” Often the manager does listen, in the moment. What’s missing is the loop back. Someone raises an idea, gets a nod, and then hears nothing. People can live with “no, and here’s why.” What wears them down is nothing at all. Closing the loop is a skill, and an easy one to teach.
“I can’t see a future here.” A careers portal won’t fix this one. It usually means nobody has ever sat down with me and talked about where I’m going. The career conversation is one of the most valuable a manager can have. It’s also one of the conversations they’re least prepared for, so it gets put off until someone hands in their notice.
The pattern underneath
Look at those four translations together and the same thing sits under each one. Noticing good work. Explaining decisions. Closing the loop. Talking about someone’s future.
These aren’t culture problems or comms problems. They’re management skills, and in most organisations nobody was ever taught them. People get promoted for being good at the job, then are expected to pick up the people part as they go.
That’s why so many engagement problems turn out to be management problems in disguise. It’s also why the literal fixes don’t work. You can’t newsletter your way out of a conversation that isn’t happening.
Three things to do before the next survey
None of these needs a budget.
- Re-read last year’s free-text comments with the translation lens. Ignore the category each comment was filed under. Ask what the person was actually describing. You’ll often find that dozens of comments in different categories are really about the same thing.
- Talk to five managers. Ask them one question: “Which conversations with your team do you find yourself putting off?” Their answers will map closely onto your lowest survey scores.
- Look at your managers’ own engagement separately. If the people expected to fix engagement are struggling themselves, that’s where to start.
Send us the line you can’t decode
Every survey has one. The comment that’s come up three years running, that nobody quite knows what to do with.
We’ve spent a long time in rooms with managers working out what those lines really mean. If there’s one in your results you can’t crack, send it to us. We’re always happy to help translate.