So your organization just went through an engagement survey - hooray! You’ve been given access to the results and you might be thinking to yourself, now what? This handy guide is here to help you understand your results, feel confident leading a discussion with your team, and taking action. We recommend using the simple Understand, Act, Repeat model to take action on feedback, and assess the impact of those actions for continuous improvement.

Before we get started, let’s take a moment to think about where this feedback came from and some things to keep in mind while digesting the feedback. Engagement surveys are an opportunity for employees to have their voices be heard, with the intent of ultimately improving the organization. There will likely be a mix of positive and constructive feedback, some expected and some unexpected. This is great because we can’t take action on things we don’t know about! Feedback is a chance to peer into our blindspots. As a manager, you have an opportunity to role model how to receive this feedback. Being open and empathetic (accepting it as someone’s reality even if it’s not yours) will help your team members feel comfortable providing honest and candid feedback in the future. We’ve written more about how to approach receiving feedback, from a leadership perspective that you may find helpful.

Some people love data and will want to spend weeks dissecting and digesting every possible number and comparison available. However, this probably isn't the most useful approach to improving your culture. There is actually a lot you can do by taking a very simple approach to your results and saving more time for discussion and generating ideas for action. Thus, here we present the flow you can go through while understanding your results.

The first thing to understand is participation. If we use the analogy of voting, participation let’s you know how many people within your team took the time to cast their vote. We start off here because this gives us some context with which to view the rest of the results. On the left side of your reports, you should see participation information like the one below.

In this example, this manager leads a group with 9 employees and they have achieved an 89% response rate. This is a good response rate and exceeds our global average of around 80%. For most purposes you can relax once you hit around 75%. For a more detailed guide take a look at our post what makes a good response rate. It's good not to get too fixated on response rates - you still have people that want their voices to be heard - and you can always tell people you can only act on the feedback you receive. Once people see you acting on the feedback you'll often find your response rates going up over time. Remember, you have 100% of the people who took the time to respond so the most important thing is to consider, discuss and act on their feedback.
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If you want to dig a little further into participation, you can click on the participation tab in the top left. From this view, you can see participation based on demographics. What demographics you can see depend on how your report was configured. This page allows you to determine if the majority of responses are coming from a single demographic. For example, if your team is split across two (or more) locations and only one location participated in a meaningful way (approaching that desirable 75%), this is something to keep in mind while reviewing the results.

We often use the average score from a few key questions to create a combined outcome factor such as Engagement, as shown above. This factor represents the key outcome your organization wants to improve and typically this is Engagement. The scores themselves are percent favorable scores - they represent the percentage of people who rated the questions using either of the top two rating options (typically Agree and Strongly Agree). You can read more about our response formats and how we calculate favorability in our article: Likert question response formats and the agree format.

You’ll notice in the example above to the right of the Engagement factor is a green line with +12. This visual shows that the 75% Engagement factor score is higher than the comparison by 12 percentage points, therefore the comparison Engagement score is 63%. To check what the results are being compared to, look to the “Compared To” toggle in the top right.

Currently the results are being compared to the Company Overall. You might also have other comparison options, including historical surveys, or a benchmark score to compare results against. If you’ve gone through the survey process before, then comparing to previous results will be most enlightening to see if your/organizational actions have made an impact on previous focus areas. If this is your first time, comparing to the Company Overall will help you understand where your team is having a different experience (positive or negative) than others in the organization.

The other factors are usually combinations of questions (just like the Key Factor above) that represent aspects of the workplace that may influence or impact your Key Factor score. For example, we'd expect things such as Leadership and Management to have an impact on Engagement levels amongst employees. You can see how favorable (green), neutral (light grey) or unfavorable (red) your team feels about these work experiences by hovering on each factor. As with the Key Factor, the green and red bars on the right show how this factor compares.

Clicking the heading will sort any of the columns and clicking on any factor will take you through to see the individual items that contribute to the factor.

The Questions tab allows you to get more granular by looking at the results for each item, rather than broad factors. Again, clicking the heading will sort any of the columns. For a quick run through of the question-level results:

Understanding where our relative strengths and opportunities lie is important but before we move on to discussing the results, there is one crucial bit of context we’re missing: Impact. We generally use a Key Factor, such as Engagement, as our primary indicator in our ongoing quest to improve our culture (or whatever else we want to improve). However, Key Factors such as Engagement tend to measure things that are the outcomes of many inputs and are hard to directly impact - it is difficult to make people want to stay at your company, for example. This is where measuring impact comes into play - to see which non-outcome questions had the biggest impact on Engagement scores across all of the individuals in your organization. The report uses driver analysis to identify which items will have the largest impact on the Key Factor. For example, you might have an item that is very low scoring but is not a high driver of Engagement at your organization.

As a manager, you may be asked to find a specific focus that your team would like to take action on. This area can be determined in collaboration with your team, however, that team discussion will run smoother if you understand how to select a focus area. A good candidate for focus has ample room for improvement (low favorability or below comparison) and has a high (or medium) impact on the key factor. We’ve developed the Focus agent to crunch all the available data within your report to highlight the areas we’d recommend you focus on first, taking into account all the data points we highlighted above.

As a manager you may or may not have access to comments. Access to comments is sometimes restricted because they can often be identifiable and in many cases it is best to view them after you have absorbed your quantitative results. Check with your HR administrator as to what you have been given access to. Comments can provide some interesting color and some further insight into specific issues that may be raised by your survey. However, comments should be viewed as secondary to the quantitative results for a number of reasons:

Here's an example most of us can probably relate to:

The best thing to do with comments is leave them until you've absorbed your results and then to use them as a way to understand additional details. If you have a low score on something check the comments for those that might help you understand that score, and then do the same for areas where you have higher scores. Comments can form part of your results conversations where you ask employees about their thoughts but remember they are more individual representations, so it is best to paraphrase a few that are constructive and in line with the overall results. This can emphasize that it is the overall results that will shape the ongoing conversation and action and that constructive comments are going to get the most voice.

Remember, a survey is just a tool to help guide your focus, your discussions with employees, and to track your progress. Once you’ve absorbed the results, it’s time to start discussing!

Set up a time for your team to discuss the survey results. Where possible, do this in person and in a room where people will feel comfortable being candid. In most cases, we recommend you review the results as a group in the Culture Amp platform, but using pdf exports is also an option. Additionally, it may be helpful to set the stage with some ground rules...

Discussing results requires the courage to be vulnerable. Walk through the results with your team in a similar flow to the above (Participation, Key Factor, Other Factors, Questions). Highlighting where the results aligned with your expectations and where they surprised you may make others feel open to sharing their own thoughts. Then ask about perceived strengths and areas to explore further.

It's also important to discuss how these results apply to your everyday interactions. For highest scoring items, what does your team do differently that led to a positive result? For lowest scoring items, what are the behaviors/processes that can be developed?

Once the results have been shared and discussed, your team is ready to select 1-2 focus areas to get started on straight away. We recommend sticking to a small number so you can make meaningful change.

You might consider the recommended focus areas highlighted in the platform by the Focus Agent. When selecting a focus, think about:

Once you’ve selected your focus area, it can be difficult to know what to do next. In particular, what are the specific actions the team can take to improve? Many successful strategies can come from:

When choosing an action, always consider your unique context. What works at one organization might not jive with the values in yours. Even within an organization, one team experiences different constraints than another. Always gut check with your team to see if the action makes sense to them. When warranted, edit these actions so they align better within your team structure, context and culture.

Now that you know where you want to go, think about the next steps you need to get there. To ensure that changes are made and not just talked about, give each step an owner (even if it's the whole team) and a timeframe for implementation. These don't need to be set in stone but will set the stage for accountability and proper implementation. Make sure to continue to check in with the team to see how things are going. For example, asking your team: “From our Engagement Survey last quarter, we committed to using a trello board to have greater visibility of responsibility across the team - how has this been going? Any suggestions for how to improve?”

Once you had your action running for over a month, think about checking in with your team. Click on Complete Action button and then Get team feedback button to send a short survey to your team and measure effectiveness of the action.

Now that you closed the loop on your action and got feedback, you have entered Repeat stage. We've found it helpful to answer these questions with your team while you're still in action mode:

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