What's the answer to all these engagement surveys?

Times

19-06-2025

We live in a feedback economy. I am bombarded with endless emails and alerts asking me to rate Uber drivers, shoe shops and even short rail journeys. 'We'd love two minutes of your time to hear your feedback on your recent booking to Watford Junction,' was a recent one. But for many, there is one feedback request that has become as a regular feature of office life as the stressy emails about dirty mugs in the kitchen: the employee engagement survey.
Last week, I attended The Festival of Work, which you may think is oxymoronic, but there were taco stalls, selfie booths, a 'wellbeing village' and lots of bunting. It was the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development's annual conference, a shindig for HR executives, held in Excel London; 13,000 people attended and I don't think all of them were there for the free biros and Cadbury Heroes, which — and surely a sign of an impending recession — appear to have replaced Tony's Chocolonely as the free confectionery of choice at conferences.
HR used to be about recruiting and firing workers, sorting out their pay and benefits. Now? In the words of Hi Bob, the main sponsor of the Festival of Work, it's all about 'powering productivity, engagement, and retention'. The Holy Grail of all HR managers: engage your workers and they'll be more productive. Or that's the theory. 'Absolutely, you can see that connection between a highly engaged workforce and a higher performance,' says Steph Kukoyi, senior people scientist at Culture Amp, another sponsor.
How do you know if your workers are engaged? Well, you survey them. As both Hi Bob and Culture Amp design and undertake employee engagement surveys for companies it is understandable they emphasise the relationship between productivity and engagement — a rather woolly term that can mean anything from 'highly-motivated' to 'not resentful about turning up to work'.
The biggest of all these survey companies is Gallup, which claims 'measuring and managing engagement in your organisation is critical to the success of your employees and organization as a whole'. Could there be a link between this statement and the fact Gallup charges thousands of pounds to companies to survey their workers? I couldn't possibly say. What I can say is that the employee engagement industry has become a huge one, supported by company directors.
At Lloyds Bank, Charlie Nunn, the chief executive, last year received a £1.27 million bonus, some of which was decided on a 'culture and colleague engagement' score — one of many CEOs rewarded in this way. This, of course, may explain why workers are endlessly pestered to fill in forms saying how happy they are.
But is it making any difference? Is asking millions of workers how strongly they agree or disagree with the statement 'my manager genuinely cares about my wellbeing' improving productivity?
Looking at Gallup's data, the answer is: no. Its most recent data prompted the slightly hysterical headline from Gallup itself: 'Employee Engagement on the Brink'. This was because the global percentage of engaged employees fell from 23 per cent to 21 per cent. But, if you go back to 2011 it was 12 per cent and had steadily increased since, before reversing slightly in the last couple of years. Engagement has slowly improved over time but we know from the economic data, productivity has stalled. The link between the two is shaky at best, and even companies that can prove a correlation — from their own data — struggle to prove a causal link.
Paul Sweeney, author of Magnetic Nonsense: a short history of bullshit at work and how to make it go away, categorises engagement surveys as: 'Let's ask the children how they're feeling, and then we can give them a playdate to cheer them up.' They tackle the symptoms of problems in the workplace, not the root causes.
Also, he says, the surveys create 'an unhealthy dynamic where employees think the way to solve problems is to complain about them in the survey, with no responsibility on their part to help resolve the issues'.
There are some solutions. One is to forget a big, cumbersome annual survey with 57 different questions to which most people answer 'neither agree nor disagree', with so-called pulse surveys asking just a couple of focused questions once a month.
Another route is the AI one. I met an interesting company at the Festival of Work called Inpulse, which instead of asking workers to 'agree or disagree' with rote statements, asks them how they feel by getting them to write a sentence or two into a text box. It then asks them why they feel that way. 'It is super open-ended. It lets them direct the conversation,' says Andrew Nguyen, co-ceo at Inpulse. 'By asking the employee how they're feeling and why, you get a much richer data set.' The company then uses AI to scan the language and categorise the comments so the company can work out how proud, committed or stressed and unappreciated they are. Inpulse is already working with the likes of Balfour Beatty, Lastminute.com and Arriva.
It is very clever and I can see this approach might get more useful results than asking people to score everything on a five-point scale. But the method doesn't matter if the management uses the data to prove what it wanted to hear in the first place or uses it as a way to ignore having difficult conversations with its staff. As Nguyen himself says, the survey only works if workers can see that 'their input is heard and valued and acted on'. Did anything change as a result of the last employee engagement survey? Were the nightmare rotas sorted? Did someone stop leaving dirty mugs in the kitchen?
Because if nothing changes, these surveys are as pointless and as annoying as asking me about my trip to Watford Junction.