How to turn your engagement insights into action

The engagement survey is closed. You’ve had a fantastic response rate. Now you’re left drowning in the data, wondering where do I begin!?

You’re not alone.

Whilst nearly every organisation measures engagement, only half react with a plan of action.

So, if you want to make meaningful engagement gains this year, here’s how to turn that data into action.

Be ruthless with your priorities

You can’t tackle everything at once. Instead, cluster your results into themes like recognition, communication, leadership. Then decide the 2-3 priorities that will help create your desired culture, or move you closer towards it. Now, with your priorities pinpointed, decide the outcomes you want to achieve this year. It could be that ‘people feel recognised by their People Manager’ or ‘people receive regular feedback’. Not only will this give you a measure, it’ll help protect your energy and enable you to say “NO” to scattered initiatives that don’t align with your priorities.

Co-create the actions

You’ve analysed the data, you’ve found the priorities, now it’s time to decide the actions you’re going to take.

At this stage, get your people involved. Providing them with an opportunity to contribute ensures you’re responding to their actual experience, not what you think their experience is.

Host a series of focus groups and share your priorities for the year ahead. Listen to their experience and ask one question: if we fixed one thing in this area over the next few months, what should it be?

Use this insight to create 3-5 actions that will move you from where you are today, to where you want to be.

Be visible and don’t wait for perfect

Prioritise actions that are visible and easy to implement. This will give people confidence that you’ve listened to what they’ve said and doing something meaningful about it.

But what about the ‘bigger’ priorities? For the ones that take time to plan, sign-off, and implement, don’t let perfection be a barrier to progress.

Why not trial that recognition scheme in one function? Test it. Learn from it. And adapt it.

Pilots are a great way of making people part of the progress before you’re ready to scale wider.

Close the loop often

“You said, we did” shouldn't be an annual slide we dust off just before the next survey. It loses credibility when people only hear about actions at survey time.

Instead, build it into your regular comms rhythm. Share small updates often, show where teams have shaped decisions and point to tangible differences people can feel in their day-to-day experience.

Making progress visible throughout the year is what helps people feel informed, included and confident that speaking up genuinely leads to action.

And the final piece of advice.

Experience is what do you do. Engagement is what you get.

When we focus on how people experience work, engagement, performance and delivery follows.