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“I’m just so sick of filling in these surveys because nothing ever changes. It feels emotionally unfair to keep asking me to answer these questions when I know you’re not going to do anything about it.”
If you’ve been in organisational development for any length of time, this sentiment probably sounds familiar. Despite significant investment in employee engagement surveys, many organisations find themselves asking the same questions year after year, with limited improvement in either engagement scores or business outcomes.
What if we’ve been looking through the wrong lens entirely?
Expanding Our View: From Engagement to Organisational Performance
Employee engagement surveys have served an important purpose. They’ve helped organisations recognise that employee experience matters to business results. This shift represented a significant evolution in organisational thinking, moving beyond purely transactional employment relationships to acknowledge the human dimension of work.
However, somewhere along the way, many organisations began treating engagement scores as the ultimate destination rather than a signpost pointing toward broader organisational health. Engagement became the goal itself, complete with benchmarks, targets, and performance indicators rather than what it was originally intended to measure: the conditions that enable people to do their best work.
This focus creates a fundamental challenge: we’re optimising for correlation rather than causation. High engagement often correlates with strong business performance, but that doesn’t mean improving engagement scores directly causes better outcomes. When we chase engagement as an end goal, we risk addressing symptoms while missing the underlying factors that create both engaged employees and high-performing organisations.
What the Research Tells Us
A comprehensive systematic review of employee survey follow-up processes reveals some intriguing patterns. While engagement surveys measure important factors, organisations consistently struggle with translating results into meaningful change. Research shows that “the follow-up process after surveys, including action planning, is important. Nevertheless, this process is oftentimes neglected in practice.”
Even when organisations attempt to act on survey results, studies find that “most results of the studies included in this review were rather mixed” and improvements are often “short-lived” with “a lack of follow-through regarding the planned actions.”
When researchers surveyed practitioners from large organisations, “the top three barriers to effective post-survey action planning named were execution (following through), importance (lacking attention by executive management), and resources (especially time, but also lacking training, technical, and financial resources).”
This isn’t a criticism of engagement surveys, it’s an insight into why focusing solely on individual employee experience might be limiting our impact.
The Hidden Reality: Teams as the Unit of Work
Consider this structural reality that’s been hiding in plain sight: work in organisations mostly happens through teams. People don’t just work for companies, they work within specific team contexts, with particular colleagues, toward defined goals, using established processes. Teams are where strategy meets execution, where individual capabilities combine to create collective outcomes, and where employees spend the majority of their working hours.
Yet despite this obvious truth, we’ve largely ignored teams as the primary unit of organisational capability and change. We’ve focused on individual employee sentiment while overlooking the team environment that shapes that very experience. When we shift our attention to teams, not as a research revelation, but as recognition of an organisational reality we’ve been undervaluing, we gain a completely different lens for both understanding and improving performance.
The Unexpected Dividend: Better Engagement Through Team Focus
Seven years ago, we embarked on a rigorous field research study to understand what truly makes team effective in real organisational contexts. We weren’t trying to replace engagement surveys. We were curious about team effectiveness. We set out to crack the code of great teams, and we discovered something we hadn’t anticipated.
Employee engagement consistently improves as a natural byproduct of focusing on factors within teams’ control. We didn’t set out to specifically increase engagement, but that has been the result time and again.
The Team Advantage: Why This Lens Changes Everything
Working at the team level offers several advantages that address the limitations of individual-focused approaches:
Contextual Relevance: Each team operates in a unique context with specific challenges and opportunities. Generic organisational solutions rarely fit the nuanced reality of individual teams.
Actionable Scope: Teams can directly influence things that are within their control, like team goals, day-to-day ways of working and stakeholder relationships. They don’t need executive approval to improve how they run meetings, make decisions, or clarify roles.
Sustainable Change: When teams develop their own capabilities for effectiveness, improvements are more likely to stick because they’re embedded in how the team works, not dependent on external interventions.
Cascading Impact: As teams become more effective, they naturally improve their relationships with other teams, their stakeholders, and their contribution to organisational goals.
The Strategic Question
The question isn’t whether organisations should care about employee engagement. The question is whether we’re using the most effective lens for understanding and improving both employee experience and organisational performance.
Rather than asking “How engaged are our people?” consider asking “How effectively are our teams working together to achieve meaningful outcomes?”
This shift doesn’t require abandoning concern for individual employee experience. Instead, it recognises that individual experience is largely shaped by the team context in which people work. When we focus on creating effective teams, engagement becomes a natural outcome rather than an elusive target.
In our next article, we’ll explore what seven years of applied research revealed about what actually makes teams effective—and give you a simple exercise to test these insights with your own team.