In 2021, Mark Whittle, Gartner’s own vice president of research and advisory, found that only 29% of employees trust their organisation with the data collected through common feedback processes and technologies. That figure isn’t necessarily speaking about employee ownership, or any particular sector, or any specific survey tool. Instead, it’s a general finding about how people feel when they’re asked to fill in an anonymous form at work.
Most leadership teams treat their annual engagement survey as a genuinely honest snapshot of how the organisation feels. If close to three-quarters of people don’t fully trust the process, that assumption starts to look shaky. Even if trust in anonymity isn’t the problem, there’s a second issue that we touched on earlier in this series. Averaging responses across a whole organisation smooths away exactly the individual variation that determines whether any one person is actually engaged. Put those two problems together, and a great deal of strategic decision-making in UK businesses is being built on data that may be both dishonestly given. It’s also stripped of any detail that could make it useful.
Most engagement surveys do go further than a single organisation-wide number. Reasonably well-run ones break results down by division, department, or team, provided each group is large enough to preserve some sense of anonymity. That threshold varies, but some survey tools will report a result separately for a group as small as three or four people.
That creates a genuine bind. A team of three or four isn’t meaningfully anonymous in any real sense. Everyone in it can probably guess who said what, so the very granularity that would make the data useful is also the point at which people are least likely to answer honestly. Go finer than that threshold and the survey stops reporting altogether. Folding smaller teams back into a wider group average may preserve confidentiality, but at the cost of hiding exactly the detail a leadership team most needs.
Imagine a business where the survey is broken down by department. One department, twenty-two people, comes back at a respectable 68%. Reasonable, by most benchmarks. What that departmental average still can’t tell is whether the score is evenly spread across all twenty-two people. It might really be two very different stories sitting on top of each other: a sub-team of six scoring close to 95%, entirely happy, and another sub-team of five scoring closer to 40%, quietly disengaged and starting to look elsewhere. That second sub-team is too small to break out separately — doing so would make it too easy to identify. The department-level average masks a problem that’s actually concentrated and urgent rather than mild and general. The actions that would fix one situation would do very little for the other.
Trust in these surveys tends to erode for reasons that have very little to do with the survey tool itself. In a smaller team, people can often work out how someone might trace their answers back to them, whatever reassurances sit on the cover page. That alone can be enough to make some people soften their answers or stay silent altogether.
Organisations also erode trust when a survey runs, results are shared in a slide deck, and then nothing visibly changes before the next one arrives. After a few cycles of that pattern, people reasonably conclude that the exercise is more about being seen to ask than about genuinely acting on what’s found. They then respond accordingly the next time round.
The encouraging part of Whittle’s research is that this is fixable. His analysis found that when organisations communicate well at all three stages of a survey: before it launches, while it’s running, and after the results come back, employee trust rises to 86%. The difference isn’t the survey tool. It’s whether people can see, concretely, that their previous answers actually changed something. That’s a leadership responsibility, not a technology one. It’s also a useful reminder that the fix for unreliable data often has very little to do with the survey itself.
This is precisely the gap the Engage for Success research tries to address, work developed by David MacLeod and the movement he founded. Their research identifies four enablers of engagement that consistently show up in organisations that get this right. These are a strategic narrative people genuinely believe, managers who build trust and give real feedback, employees who feel heard, and integrity between what leadership says and what it actually does.
Jim Harter’s research goes further. It shows that manager engagement specifically has an outsized effect on team engagement. Organisations with genuinely engaged managers see meaningfully higher engagement across the board. None of that shows up in a single organisational average. It only becomes visible, and actionable, when you can see engagement broken down by team and by manager.
The previous two articles in this series looked at engagement at two levels. Firstly at the individual level, using Harrison’s Engagement and Employment Expectations approach to show what genuinely drives one person. Secondly, at the manager level, showing why understanding that data matters for the conversations a manager has with their team. At the leadership level, the same underlying data becomes something different again. It becomes a way to see patterns across the whole organisation without losing the individual detail that makes it meaningful.
Rather than a single anonymous score, Harrison’s team and organisational dashboards roll up the same individual-level data used in one-to-one conversations. That means leadership can see, for instance, that autonomy expectations are going consistently unmet in one part of the business, while a different team’s real issue is recognition. It can also show that a particular management layer is where fulfilment scores drop away sharply.
That’s the kind of detail a leadership team can actually act on. It points towards specific interventions in specific parts of the business, rather than a generic, organisation-wide engagement initiative that spreads effort thinly across problems that may not even exist everywhere.
None of this is unique to employee ownership. Every leadership team, whatever their legal structure, wants to know whether the organisation is genuinely engaged. They also want to know whether that engagement drives the kind of behaviour that improves performance. What changes in an employee-owned business is what’s riding on getting this right. The whole model depends on ownership behaviour showing up broadly, not just in pockets. A leadership team working from a single misleading average can’t know whether that’s actually happening, or where to focus if it isn’t.
There’s also a particular irony for employee-owned businesses specifically. Transition to an EOT is usually accompanied by a genuine commitment to greater transparency, more openness about financial performance, more visibility into decision-making. That’s a real and valuable shift. But transparency about the business doesn’t automatically produce trust in how the business listens. A leadership team that has genuinely opened up its books may still rely on engagement data that people don’t fully trust. The two things need building separately, and it’s easy to assume that progress on one means progress on the other.
Seeing where the gaps sit is the diagnostic step. What a leadership team does with that insight is the strategic one. That’s where a proper engagement strategy earns its place, rather than a reactive response to whatever the latest survey happened to throw up.
We’ve put together a free download about building a genuine engagement and retention strategy. It covers the practical steps: understanding your current position, equipping your managers properly, building an employee value proposition that goes beyond pay. It uses individual-level data like Harrison’s to keep the strategy grounded in reality rather than guesswork.
From there, the guide points you towards our T4P Clarity Matrix scorecard. The scorecard is a short exercise which gives you a score across the four quadrants shaping organisational performance, business strategy, people strategy, business performance, and people performance. Engagement sits within the people strategy quadrant. If your top team completes it, we’ll also send you a complimentary executive summary. It collates your results and prioritises the actions most likely to move the needle over the next three to six months.
Has a departmental engagement score ever left you wondering what’s really going on underneath it? Downloading the guide is probably the most useful next step available to you.
All journeys start with a first step. Take yours today.
Identify your priorities by completing the Clarity Matrix™ Scorecard, or just get in touch. We are happy to arrange an informal chat. This will help you clarify your needs and how we may be able to help you achieve your strategic objectives.
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