Devastated with Your Employee Engagement Survey Results? Do This Next

How Courageous Leaders Respond to Tough Employee Engagement Survey Feedback

You open your employee engagement survey results, and your stomach drops. You knew your team had concerns, but this is a shocker.

After all, you care about your team and try to be a human-centered leader. You’ve invested in them and support their work. And still—there it is, the numbers are shocking and the comments sting.

You’re disappointed. Frustrated. Maybe you even feel betrayed.

Before you jump to fixing—or defending—pause. Tough employee engagement survey results aren’t proof that you’ve failed. They’re a signal that your team is navigating something hard, and they’re telling you how it feels from their perspective.

What matters most is what you do next.

A Simple Way to Sort Tough Feedback

Many engagement surveys surface concerns that are genuinely outside a leader’s control—recent layoffs that have shaken people’s sense of security, worries about pay and benefits, or frustrations with facilities and resources.

When everything feels heavy, it helps to sort the feedback into three simple buckets: What’s outside of your control, areas you can influence, and issues you (or your team) can fix.

1. Outside your control

These include things like layoffs already made, compensation structures, benefits, or facilities. You may not be able to fix these—but you can acknowledge the impact, communicate honestly, and treat people with empathy and respect.

2. Influenceable, even if not fully fixable

This bucket includes areas where you may contribute perspectives and ideas, even if you don’t have direct control.  These may not remove uncertainty, but they can reduce anxiety. For example, you might not be able to change a decision, but you can ensure you team understands why the decision was made and how it will impact them.

3. Fully in your control

This is the sweet spot for your next steps: Ensuring people understand what’s expected of them at work, recognition, development conversations, and how you prioritize and follow through.

This approach helps you avoid two common traps: taking everything personally, or dismissing the feedback because some of it feels out of reach.

From there, you can focus on quick, visible actions that restore confidence and momentum.

4 Steps to Addressing Your Employee Engagement Survey Feedback

Here are four steps to responding well to discouraging employee engagement survey feedback.

Step 1: Start with Quick Wins You Control

When engagement dips, leaders often get discouraged by what they can’t fix.

Instead, ask yourself:
“What did the survey surface that I can address—quickly and credibly?”

Look for themes like:

• Career development or lack of growth

• Training and skill-building

• Recognition and appreciation

• Clarity of priorities or expectations

• Communication and transparency

Then commit out loud.

For example, if career development showed up schedule the finish.

“By the end of the next 30 days, I will meet with each of you to talk about your goals and create a development plan we’ll revisit quarterly.”

Step 2: Talk One-on-One—and Ask Courageous Questions

Before rolling out solutions, slow down long enough to listen.

Meet individually with your team members and ask a few courageous questions that invite honesty and ideas—not complaints on repeat.

Try these:

• “What’s one way we could improve our cross-departmental collaboration?

• What’s one meeting we could change or eliminate to save you time?

Then do the hardest (and most important) part:
Listen without defending, explaining, or fixing in the moment.

Your job in this stage isn’t to solve—it’s to understand.

Step 3: Bring the Team Together to Co-Create Solutions

Once you’ve listened, share what you heard—without attribution—and invite the team to own the next step together.

Say something like:

“Here are the themes I heard. We can’t fix everything at once, but we can choose one or two areas within our control  to improve as a team.”

Then ask:

• “Which of these should we tackle first?”

• “What would ‘better’ look like in 60 or 90 days?”

• “What’s one small experiment we could try?”

Together, build a simple action plan:

• One or two focus areas

• Clear actions

• Owners

• Check-in dates

When people help design the solution, they’re far more likely to engage in making it work.

Step 4: Respond With Regard —Schedule the Finish

Nothing kills engagement faster than asking for input and doing nothing with it.

Close the loop by saying:

“Here’s what we’re working on. Here’s what I’m accountable for. And here’s when we’ll check progress.”

Then check progress.

Engagement isn’t rebuilt in one meeting or one survey cycle. It’s rebuilt through consistent, visible leadership behaviors—especially when things are hard.

If you could use some help with your team’s strategic planning or with your employee engagement survey response, we can help. Contact us.