Your engagement survey cannot tell you if people will speak up
Engagement measures how people feel about working here. Whether they will raise a problem is a different construct, and conflating them is how boards get surprised.
by Dr Aileen Struthers
Your engagement survey cannot tell you if people will speak up
Engagement surveys measure satisfaction, advocacy and intent to stay. They are useful for what they measure. They are routinely used as a proxy for whether an organisation hears bad news early, and for that they are close to worthless.
The two come apart in a specific and dangerous way. A team can be highly engaged precisely because it is cohesive, positive and reluctant to introduce friction — and that team will not tell you the project is late. We have seen a function score in the top quartile for engagement in the same quarter it failed to escalate a known safety issue for eleven weeks.
What you want to measure is voice: whether people believe raising a problem is safe, worth the effort, and likely to produce a response. There are validated scales for it. They ask concrete things — whether someone has raised a concern in the last three months, what happened, whether they would do it again.
The last of those is the one that predicts. An organisation where people have raised things and seen a response has a self-reinforcing loop. One where they have raised things and seen nothing has a silence that no amount of encouragement will break, because the silence is the rational response.
The practical implication is uncomfortable for a leadership team: the fastest way to improve voice is not to run a campaign about speaking up. It is to respond visibly to the next three things raised, including the ones that are inconvenient and the one that is about you.
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