Why Employee Engagement Surveys Miss the Point

Editorial Note
This essay is part of the Cultivated canon — a body of work exploring how value is created through clarity, behaviour, and everyday management practice.

Why Employee Engagement Surveys Miss the Point

Employee engagement surveys are everywhere. In many organisations, they have become a corporate ritual — something that must be done, reviewed, and reported.

In some companies, engagement scores now sit alongside profit and loss during annual reporting. As HR functions come under increasing pressure to demonstrate value, these surveys are often positioned as proof that an organisation is “looking after its people”.

But this is where the thinking starts to drift.

Engagement is not HR’s job. It belongs to management.

That distinction matters more than most organisations realise.

The premise behind engagement surveys is deceptively simple. Ask employees a set of questions, calculate an engagement score, and assume that higher engagement leads to higher productivity, which in turn improves business results.

On paper, it sounds logical. In practice, it rarely works that way.

Surveys do not measure engagement in a meaningful or actionable sense. At best, they provide a lagging signal. At worst, they create a false sense of control over something deeply human and dynamic.

This is not a criticism of HR. Many HR teams are under immense pressure, and engagement surveys are an easy, packaged solution. They are quick wins that look good in board decks. But like off-the-shelf transformation frameworks, they often fail to address the underlying issues.

The first question any organisation should ask is not how engaged are our people? but what problem are we actually trying to solve?

Without clarity on the problem, the data is noise. Engagement cannot be diagnosed from a distance. It is experienced up close, through daily work, relationships, and systems. Managers who observe carefully, listen well, and act on what they see will always outperform survey dashboards.

There is also no meaningful industry standard. Engagement tools vary wildly in questions, scoring models, and interpretation. Headlines about national engagement levels collapse under scrutiny once you ask: according to which methodology? Comparisons become meaningless, yet the numbers still carry authority.

More importantly, surveys are lagging measures. They capture what was, not what is. Engagement fluctuates with workload, team dynamics, leadership behaviour, and personal circumstance. A once-a-year snapshot cannot reflect this reality.

Real engagement is shaped in real time. It shows up in how obstacles are removed, how feedback is given, and how clearly work is framed. These are managerial acts, not survey outcomes.

There is also a persistent myth that high engagement automatically leads to high performance. In practice, the two can be completely disconnected. Teams can feel happy, supported, and comfortable while adding very little value. Incentivising survey participation or rewarding high scores may temporarily inflate numbers, but it often weakens the organisation’s focus on meaningful outcomes.

Engagement that is not linked to value creation, customer impact, and purposeful work quickly becomes performative.

Surveys also come at a cost. They consume time and energy across HR, management, and the workforce. Designing them, running them, analysing them, and attempting to act on them absorbs attention that could be spent fixing real problems. If the organisation cannot clearly articulate what will change as a result, the exercise becomes little more than organisational theatre.

They are also easy to game. Recent pay rises, gifts, or short-term morale boosts can skew results. Anonymity, while encouraging honesty, often amplifies frustration and venting. Positive, steady contributions tend to disappear into the background.

Perhaps most tellingly, engagement surveys often highlight leadership failures without addressing them. Many questions focus on clarity, support, trust, and direction — all of which sit squarely in the manager’s remit. A survey can surface these gaps, but it cannot close them.

Development, coaching, and support for managers will always do more for engagement than another measurement cycle.

At their worst, surveys reduce people to a number. Complex human motivation is flattened into a percentage. Nuance disappears. Context is lost.

True engagement cannot be averaged.

It comes from managers who know their people, understand their strengths, and create the climate for challenging, meaningful work. It is built through clarity, feedback, and care. It happens in one-to-ones, in team conversations, and in how work is designed.

Surveys can complement this work, but they cannot replace it.

The organisations that truly excel understand this distinction. They invest less in measuring engagement, and more in developing managers who can create it — every day, in the work itself.

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Editor’s note: This essay grows from an earlier exploration in another medium. The thinking remains central, even as the format has changed.