Gallup has been tracking global employee engagement for decades. And yet despite billions spent on surveys, action plans, consultants, and initiatives, the numbers have barely moved. Most organisations still sit somewhere between 20-30% of employees genuinely engaged. We keep doing the same thing, year after year, and wondering why nothing changes.
So let me make an uncomfortable statement – what if the survey itself is part of the problem?
The survey trap
I’ve spent many years working with organisations on employee engagement and experience and I’ve watched the same cycle play out more times than I can count. The annual survey goes out. Results come back. Senior leaders pore over the data. Action plans are written. The bottom-scoring themes get highlighted, often something like “communication” or “trust” and then a flurry of activity and projects trying to fix what’s seen as broken. Then a few months later, everyone quietly forgets about it all until the next survey rolls around.
Sound familiar?
The survey has become a kind of comfort blanket. It gives the illusion that something is being done about engagement. It speaks the language that many senior leaders feel comfortable with – data, indices, benchmarks, percentage points. It packages up something that is fundamentally about human feelings and experience, and turns it into a management report. And despite my background as a research psychologist, I think this is precisely where things go wrong.
We’re asking the wrong questions
Here’s the thing that doesn’t get said enough: most surveys make a huge assumption. They assume they already know what questions to ask.
They absolutely don’t.
Off-the-shelf surveys are built on generic models of what engagement “should” look like. But engagement is deeply personal, and what drives it varies enormously from one organisation to another, and from one person to another. If you’re asking the wrong questions, you’ll get answers to the wrong questions. And then you’ll take action on the wrong things. And then nothing will change.
This is the fundamental flaw at the heart of the traditional survey approach. It’s a deficit model, find the lowest scores, fix those things, repeat. But fixing what’s broken doesn’t automatically create what’s brilliant. And it almost always misses the things that actually matter most to your people.
Start with stories, not scores
At People Lab our approach is different, and it always has been, and it starts long before anyone fills in a survey.
We begin by asking: what does good look like?
We invite people to share stories about their best experiences at work. Not what’s going wrong. Not what they wish was better. But the moments when they felt most alive, most engaged, most themselves. These “best experience” conversations are rich, qualitative, deeply human. And the themes that emerge from them tell you something no tick-box survey ever could. They tell you what actually matters to your people, in your organisation, in your specific context.
This is how our EX Lens model was developed. Thousands of best experience stories, distilled into nine universal themes – things like meaning, belonging, trust, autonomy, connection, growth. These are the conditions that consistently show up when people talk about thriving at work. But even more importantly there will be more -stuff that comes out that doesn’t map to a universal theme but is critical to your people.
Once you understand what good looks like for your people, then you design your measurement. Not the other way around.
What changes when you flip it around
When you start with qualitative insight, with stories and conversations, something interesting happens even before you’ve designed a single survey question. People feel heard. They’ve been invited to talk about what matters to them, not just rate things on a liker scale of 1 to 5. Lines of communication open up between managers and teams. Small but meaningful things start to shift.
I remember working with one client where we ran best experience workshops early in the process. A call centre employee mentioned, almost in passing, that the vending machines were always empty on weekends and there was nowhere nearby to get food. His manager said “that’s easy to fix” and came in the next day with a microwave. Simple. But the employee said the most meaningful part wasn’t the microwave itself. It was being asked the question in the first place and even more so being listened to. “You’ve never asked me before what matters to me at work.”
That’s what changes when you put people first.
When the survey does eventually go out, it’s asking questions that have emerged from real conversations with real people. Employees recognise themselves in the questions. They feel the relevance. Response quality improves. And when you analyse the results and move to action, you’re working on the things that will actually make a difference, not just the things that scored lowest on a model someone else designed.
A different kind of measurement
The EX Lens Diagnostic is built on this foundation. It measures performance against those nine universal themes, using questions drawn from established, validated psychometric scales. But it’s designed to be used as part of a broader, human-centred approach, not as a standalone exercise in data collection.
Crucially, we’d encourage you to treat it as a starting point, not an end point. Run your best experience conversations first. Understand what good looks like for your people. Then use the diagnostic to measure, benchmark, and track progress over time. And resist the temptation to roll everything up into one big “EX Index”, the power is in understanding where you’re strong and where you need to focus, theme by theme.
Download our EX Lens research paper here, and delve into your people’s ‘best experience’ with this free tool.
And if you’d like us to come in and help you use these insights in a meaningful and impactful way, then reach out – we’d love to talk!
The real question
We’re not anti-survey, data and insight matter. But the question isn’t whether to measure, it’s what you measure, and how you get there.
If your engagement scores have been stubbornly flat for years, it might not be that your people aren’t engaged. It might be that you’ve been measuring the wrong things, taking action on the wrong priorities, and missing what actually makes a difference to the humans in your organisation.
Start with stories. Start with “what does good look like?” Start with your people.
Everything else follows from there.
