An interview with CEO and Founder, Vanessa Fudge.
Engagement surveys have been a staple in organisations for decades – why do you believe they are no longer fit for purpose today?
Engagement surveys, when they were first introduced, were a wonderful mechanism to understand how staff were feeling and how they were experiencing their organisations. If you fast forward nearly two decades, a lot more complexity now exists within the workplace and within organisations – yet we’re still relying on engagement data to make complex decisions and inform cultural change when it’s not telling us enough of the story.
The simplest way I can put it is this: engagement surveys show you what staff want from the business, but they don’t show you what the business needs from the staff. So you’re getting a single dimension, you’re not getting a well-informed picture of how to strengthen your organisation for an uncertain future.
You’re also getting data that is retrospective. It’s a snapshot of what people have already experienced. You’re not getting information about how to reshape your organisation so that it can sustain its performance and wellbeing into the future.
What are engagement surveys missing when it comes to understanding how people are really feeling at work?
What they’re missing is the broader context. For example, an engagement survey won’t tell you where leaders need to focus to improve the performance of their people, or even comprehensively improve their wellbeing.
They’re not going to give you information about the sustainability of your organisation in its current approach to getting work done. They won’t give you insight into the dynamics that exist between different parts of your organisation, across roles, functions, or competing priorities.
At their core, engagement surveys are really a sentiment index. That’s not to say they aren’t a piece of the puzzle, they are, but they’re certainly not the whole puzzle. Yet they’re still being used to inform organisation-wide decisions as if they are.
Many leaders rely on this type of survey data to guide decisions. What’s the risk of continuing to lean on this approach?
You only have to zoom out and look globally. Gallup has just released a report, interestingly this month, showing that engagement continues to decline year on year. What’s particularly concerning is that managers’ wellbeing seems to be declining faster than anyone else’s.
That information is about 10 years too late. We’re seeing the same problems year after year, so clearly engagement isn’t solving them. There needs to be a different approach to measurement if we’re going to address the issues that engagement surveys keep surfacing.
One of the biggest limitations is that engagement data isn’t predictive, it’s retrospective. It tells you how people felt over a period of time, but it doesn’t tell you why. And we need to get back to understanding why employees are having these experiences. The challenge is that employees don’t always know why themselves.
The real shift needs to be from symptoms to causes – designing interventions that strengthen the entire organisation as well as its people, rather than trying to appease individuals at the expense of the organisation.
If not engagement surveys, what should leaders be doing instead to genuinely understand and improve engagement?
It’s still fundamentally important to understand how people are experiencing the workplace you’ve placed them in. That’s critical. But what else do we need to measure?
In Australia, organisations are now required to measure psychosocial risks and hazards. This includes factors like psychological safety, for example, whether people feel safe to speak up, as well as whether they are operating in a sound environment to do their work.
There are also structural factors now captured in psychosocial safety legislation. This goes beyond traditional safety concerns like bullying and harassment. It includes things like role clarity, conflict, workload, and even aspects of work design. This structural information is incredibly useful in predicting how well a system can absorb future change without placing a high personal cost on individuals.
Beyond experience and compliance, we also need diagnostic culture data, insights into how to evolve culture to sustain both people and performance into the future. This moves us beyond engagement surveys into richer, more meaningful diagnostics.
Historically, diagnostics have been done at an individual level, sometimes at a team level, but rarely at an organisational level. That’s where the real value lies. And when I talk about culture, I don’t mean the outdated idea of culture “eating strategy for breakfast.” This is about culture working with strategy.
We need diagnostics that place equal emphasis on performance and wellbeing, and, importantly, how to bridge the two. Measuring the relationship between wellbeing and performance across multiple levels of the organisation produces far more meaningful insights.
For organisations still heavily invested in surveys, what’s the first step to shifting toward a more effective approach?
Interestingly, a forced shift is already happening through workplace health and safety regulations. Organisations are now expected to measure and monitor psychosocial risks, and not all risks are equal, so this is already changing what’s being measured.
There are two common mistakes organisations are making. The first is measuring psychosocial hazards in isolation. This can produce unintended consequences; people begin to see these hazards everywhere. For example, a necessary performance conversation may be misinterpreted as bullying. When these hazards are measured without context, it can lead to false positives and even increased claims or litigation.
The second mistake is simply adding psychosocial questions into an engagement survey. These tools are still individually focused and don’t provide the broader organisational context needed. They are not designed to deliver a robust compliance or systems-level assessment.
What’s needed is a more systemic approach – one that combines engagement factors, risk factors, and organisational dynamics. That’s why we developed Well@WorkTM. We couldn’t find a diagnostic that adequately addressed these complexities for our clients.
We wanted to measure engagement and risk but also understand how the system itself functions, how it absorbs pressure, how it buffers people, and how work is structured and delivered in a way that strengthens people rather than depletes them.
Ultimately, this elevates health to an organisational level – not just individual psychosocial health, but shared responsibility for creating a system where people can do their best work and remain strong in the process.
It’s also critical that the data leads to system-level interventions. Too often, engagement surveys create pressure to give people what they’ve asked for but that’s not always what the organisation needs. That creates false expectations.
We need bottom-up data to meet top-down insight so the two can be synthesised into something more meaningful. The goal is to generate insights that drive enterprise-level interventions that strengthen cohesion, performance, wellbeing, and long-term sustainability.
Is there anything else you wanted to mention?
Engagement factors like satisfaction, motivation, and pride are lag indicators. They produce data, but they don’t provide direction. What we need are lead indicators.
Right now, organisations get reams of reporting and generic recommendations, but leaders are often left unsure what to do next or why.
From a leadership perspective, relying solely on engagement surveys is like asking all the passengers how to drive the bus, you just wouldn’t do it.
Engagement surveys focus too heavily on individuals rather than systems. Engagement itself has become too broad to be truly meaningful. Leaders need actionable system intelligence: where is the pressure coming from? How is the system coping? Is performance sustainable? And where should we intervene for the greatest impact?
Ultimately, leaders need organisational health insights – not engagement scores.
Engagement surveys have had their moment. They may not be dead, but they are no longer enough.
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