The engagement survey is dying. Here’s what’s replacing it

Everyone knows how this goes. First, an email with the survey data cut a dozen ways. A column with green and red scoring against last year, and with your team’s scores versus other parts of the company. It culminates with a flurry of activity, from a slide deck to a town hall and action-planning committees. A month later, nobody mentions it again. And the company doesn’t send the survey again for a year. Jennifer felt this deeply as a division leader inside Big Tech companies like Google and Meta. She knew if she did nothing about it, people would feel like she wasn’t listening. Yet she wasn’t sure how to act on the results. No matter how many tiger teams her team created, it wasn’t clear that anything really moved the numbers. Plus, by the time they asked people again, it was a full year later, so it was hard to predict if anything they did actually created any change. Here’s the part nobody says out loud: The managers and teams living it every day already knew what the results were going to be, and the survey just captured what’s been said behind closed doors for months. The frustration is that no one has tools to drive change. Why companies measured engagement in the first plac…