One of the difficult parts for the internal HR team tasked with running the annual employee engagement survey is to determine whether the organization has done enough to respond to feedback provided in the survey. Most organizations that run an annual survey have some sort of action planning process as a follow-up to the survey. Some of those organizations choose to take a top-down approach, where priorities are set at the organization level, and action plans are made first at the top level of the organization and cascaded down to individual leaders. Other organizations take more of a grass-roots approach where action planning is led by individual leaders who set priorities based on the feedback provided by their specific teams.
There is no magic formula when it comes to action planning around a feedback event like an employee survey. For HR teams, the process of trying to document and track action plans from around the organization can be like herding cats. By the time most managers have submitted their action plans, sometimes seven months have passed. This is just the action planning stage! We often get very little data on what actions have actually been taken.
The whole process can leave HR teams asking if the juice is worth the squeeze. At TMA Performance, we have helped thousands of organizations over our 25-year history to navigate this process. Here are some of the key things we have learned over that time:
- Consistency over perfection
- Action over action planning
- Leader owned over HR owned
Consistency over Perfection
One of the problems with a big emphasis on the action planning process is that it is hard to know when enough action has been taken to feel good about running a follow-up survey. Organizations get so bogged down with worry that they haven’t done enough, that they often postpone follow-up surveys indefinitely. TMA Performance issues awards every year to the top performing organizations in our database. One of the hallmarks of these organizations is consistency in measurement. No matter what is going on in these organizations they run their engagement surveys at the same time every year. The decision to run their surveys at a set and regular time is predetermined—it is completely separate from the progress they’ve made in the action-planning process.
Measuring on a regular cadence sends an unspoken message to the organization that collecting employee feedback and measuring engagement are a regular part of the way we do business. We do not wait around for everything to be perfect before we decide to measure again. We mimic the collection and reporting of data that is done in literally every part of the organization. Operations teams do not have the luxury of waiting around for the perfect moment to report efficiency or safety metrics. Marketing teams don’t get to skip reporting on months when leads are down, and sales teams report their sales metrics every month no matter what. Employee engagement data, which is so important to understanding potential employee retention, productivity, and performance should be viewed the same way—as an operational metric that is reported upon on a regular cadence no matter what you may or may not have accomplished since the last survey.
Action over Action Planning
A common pitfall in the response to an employee engagement survey is too much emphasis on action planning and too little emphasis on action. The emphasis on action planning is very much well-intentioned. The logic behind it says, “we want to be sure action is taken at every level of the organization, and the best way to do that is to collect and monitor action plans from every leader in the organization.” In practice, the effort expended in getting every leader to submit a clear action plan is so high, that momentum is often lost when we pivot from planning to action. Many HR teams will spend months following up and prodding leaders to submit their action plans.
The practical reason why there is so much emphasis on the action plan is that it is easy to measure whether an action plan is submitted. It is less easy to measure when action is actually taken, and it is even more difficult to determine whether the action was effective. We almost accept the submission of an action plan as a proxy for real action. The solution to emphasize action over action planning is simple to say, but harder to implement, and quite difficult to measure. The measurement problem can be simplified by a commitment to regular surveying. A survey does not measure actions taken on their own, but it measures outcomes. If a manager receives low marks one year on top-down communication, and in a follow-up survey the scores significantly improve, one can infer that meaningful action was taken to make that happen. You may rightly point out that just because scores have increased, it does not necessarily mean that a manager has taken action. You may be correct, but it may not matter if you are getting the outcome you want.
Leader owned over HR owned
The discussion of preferring consistency over perfection and action over action planning brings us to what should be the ultimate goal of any employee engagement program. In so many organizations, engagement feels like an HR-led initiative. In practice, HR will always have a major role to play in gathering and communicating employee feedback to managers. The ultimate goal, however, should be that ownership of employee engagement is expanded beyond the HR team to be driven through the leadership structure.
At TMA Performance, we often talk to organizations about making progress along an employee engagement maturity model. An organization first starting out in its employee engagement journey will have a process very much led and owned by HR. The emphasis will likely be to measure employee sentiment and to react. This can be a very effective way to start your efforts, but in addition to measuring and reacting, there should always be an effort to increase buy-in among senior leaders and managers. The more buy-in you get from the executive level, the more you can expand ownership from the HR team to the leadership structure.
The leap from HR-owned to leader-owned employee engagement can only be taken with top-down accountability. In this case, we are not talking about accountability around submission of action plans. In this case we are talking about accountability to results—meaning part of the job of the manager is to monitor and positively influence the morale, satisfaction, and engagement of their teams. This level of accountability is only possible if you make the shift to treating employee feedback data as an operational metric as discussed above. If managers know their performance is in part determined by the engagement of their teams, they will make the natural adjustments necessary to encourage engagement.
There is a level of trust implicit in this approach. We are trusting that managers are capable enough to interpret data, make plans, and act on their own without supervision from HR. Some of their actions may never be stated as part of a formal action plan. In some cases, they may tweak their behavior in small ways that may be imperceptible to people outside the team. At the end of the day, they are responsible, they have ownership, and they will be held accountable to the employee feedback metrics as they are gathered.
Summary
Ultimately, the success of an employee engagement program is not determined by the elegance of its action plans, but by the consistency with which organizations listen, act, and measure outcomes over time. By treating engagement data as a core operational metric, prioritizing meaningful action over exhaustive planning, and shifting ownership from HR alone to leaders at every level, organizations can move beyond compliance-driven processes toward real cultural impact. When leaders are held accountable for results and feedback is gathered on a regular cadence, engagement stops being a periodic initiative and becomes part of how the organization operates every day.
