What engagement leads need senior leaders to know
These are the key messages from ten practitioner conversations about making employee feedback count.
I spent nearly six years as a People Scientist, helping organisations understand how their employees felt about work. Almost all of those clients struggled to turn that insight into meaningful action.
Over the last nine months, I’ve interviewed ten practitioners about employee engagement, listening and manager development. They were doing thoughtful work, often with considerable ambition. But much of what they wanted to achieve depended on decisions and focus from senior leaders who aren’t themselves always clear on their role.
An engagement lead can show a leader where where employees are struggling, and they can help managers understand the findings and develop a response. What’s more challenging, is mobilising action that actually impacts employees positively.
Based on my ten conversations, here are three messages that deserve senior leaders’ attention.
1. Fix whatever is fundamentally Broken
When the employee feedback is “X isn’t working” - you can’t just acknowledge it - you need to act on it. In one organisation, employees were working with outdated processes. Engagement activities were giving opportunities to connect, but what’s really fun - are functional daily processes.
The person responsible for engagement described how much easier it became for their work to have an impact once those broken processes were fixed.
This is a useful challenge to how we think about engagement - it’s not about events - it’s about meeting expectations. An employee can enjoy a team event and still be frustrated that a task takes twice as long as it should. They can appreciate recognition and still need someone to address the workload they have repeatedly raised.
What’s making work unnecessarily hard work?
If your feedback points to a problem in how work gets done, the response needs to reach the person who can change it. Otherwise, the engagement team is left trying to improve an experience while its underlying cause continues. I’ve heard this called "‘putting lipstick on a pig” - and I feel the image is fitting.
Leadership’s involvement in that organisation was practical. Leaders made time to speak with employees, often pausing normal work so the discussions could happen. Listening had a place in the working day because someone with authority had made room for it.
What recurring frustration have employees already told you about, and what would it take for you to remove it?
2. Give managers the training they need
One L&D leader I spoke with was designing a manager development programme. They had consulted managers, identified gaps and brought a proposal to senior leaders. Existing managers were struggling to keep up with their long and rapidly evolving task list, and people moving into management had little guidance on how to succeed. Unsurprisingly - the engagement on these managers teams were suffering - and so were their results.
Gallup found that only 44% of managers worldwide have received management training.
We expect managers to develop their people, yet more than half have had no management training themselves.
Business targets were clear across the board, but managers were given no guidance when it came to coaching and developing their teams. The L&D leader in question had made the case to leaders in the organisation that the performance issues on the team were driven by the fact that managers were not being invested in. The argument landed, and they got budget to design a programme that incorporated two key skills needed to engage a team: coaching and feedback.
Our choices reveal our priorities. When people get promoted to leadership roles - without training and time to develop - you’re prioritising speed over success.
If you expect managers to drive engagement and performance - how have you invested in their development?
3. Vocally Own the problems managers can’T
This message is one I think often gets missed. We know managers have an outsized impact on engagement - but we also know that there are things they cannot fix.
The strategy is unclear, there’s a perception that the organisation is bureaucratic, there’s low confidence in the leadership — if you’re a leader - those results sit with you.
One interviewee shared that managers struggled to separate what they could influence from what required a decision higher up. That ambiguity of ownership is where action taking goes to die!
Take clear ownership of what only a leader can change, then communicate that.
Confusion is the killer of concrete action taking.
As a leader - you need to make it crystal clear what you own, and what you want managers to own (feedback, recognition and manager support being the obvious ones).
Senior leaders need to take responsibility for those decisions. If a concern requires investment, a policy change or cooperation across functions, assigning it to a team does not give that team the authority to resolve it.
The more promising examples in the interviews involved leaders returning to the findings over time, and bringing them into regular conversations about decisions.
Which concerns from your last survey require a senior decision, and do employees know what you are doing about them?
Before asking employees to complete another survey, it is worth being able to answer those three questions.
Employees have already contributed their part by telling you about their experience. What you choose to change gives them a reason to keep contributing.
I help organisations turn employee feedback into practical action and engaging development. If your survey has highlighted a gap between what employees need and what you’re doing today, book a free 30 minute consultation and I’ll do my best to help.