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 place
Engagement does matter. We know that highly engaged employees stay longer at their companies, are more creative, more productive, and make fewer mistakes.
Gallup’s Q12 meta-analysis—the largest study of its kind, covering more than 3 million employees and 183,000 business units across 90 countries—found that the most engaged teams are associated with 23% higher profitability, 18% higher productivity, and 32% fewer quality defects than the least engaged. They also experience far less turnover and far fewer safety incidents.
Business units with the most engaged employees are more than twice as likely to post above-average performance than those with the least engaged. The gap only widens from there, with the most engaged teams nearly five times as likely to perform as well as the least engaged.
An entire industry exists to measure this problem. Almost none solve it
There’s a whole industry built around measuring engagement. Companies have built it into their operating rhythms, and often into their goals and their reporting to the board and shareholders.
The challenge is that we measure it too infrequently, and managers aren’t trained on how to act on pulse survey results or deepen engagement with their teams, so the numbers rarely move. When they do, it’s typically in pockets where an organization already has the strongest natural leaders.
Despite all the tools, engagement is actually getting worse. Data from Gallup show that engagement is at an all-time low: 31% of U.S. employees are engaged, which is flat from last year, when scores over the past decade hit rock bottom. Fully 18% of employees are actively disengaged, which Gallup says costs U.S. companies up to $2 trillion in lost productivity.
The industry knows the traditional survey approach isn’t working. Most engagement measurement tools now offer some version of a pulse survey, giving companies more frequent metrics rather than waiting a full year. Culture Amp, Qualtrics, Perceptyx, and others are all racing to build continuous listening, conversational AI, and built-in action planning.
More frequent insights sound like the fix. But the tools have arrived, and the numbers aren’t changing. So, what can companies do?
You don’t need a faster survey. You need a system of action
Based on our work at Rising Team with CHROs, CIOs, and other senior leaders across Fortune 1000 companies, startups, and global nonprofits, we see a generational shift towards an entirely different engagement model, a system designed for continuous manager and team development.
The truth is, we’ve always known what great managers do. They create trust, set clear expectations, understand different working styles, foster team collaboration, and build resilience, all in the context of an organization’s specific values and culture.
Now, AI makes it possible for companies to drive those behaviors at scale in three ways:
- Gather insights in real time: Each individual works with an AI coach (or tools like Arti, our AI leadership personal trainer) and communicates privately about their goals, needs, challenges, and concerns. They aren’t answering random questions in a survey; they’re sharing what’s actually top of mind at that moment.
- Aggregate trends instantly and as they evolve: Anonymous trend data and insights are aggregated and available to managers and admins right away, sliced by level, function, location and more. Trends keep evolving as managers and team members work with their AI coach. No need to wait another year for more data to come in.
- Customize action plans and immediately put them to use: Tools like Arti create custom plans for each manager and team member based on their unique goals and challenges, so any items that would have been raised as potential concerns in a survey are immediately actioned.
AI can leverage different modes, from coaching to role-playing of hard conversations, to supporting work processes, to helping guide team-building sessions. This becomes a system of action that helps managers and teams continuously focus on the areas that need the most attention. Now, no survey is needed. Companies have the insights to act on in real time and ensure the right actions are taken.
With AI transformations underway, the stakes are higher than ever before
For years, leaders could afford to take a lukewarm approach to engagement results and still make it through another four quarters. AI pressure is changing that. BCG’s research shows that across AI transformations they’ve studied, only 10% of success comes from the algorithms, and 20% from the technology and data infrastructure. The remaining 70% that determines whether or not a transformation is successful comes from the managers and teams leading through it.
That puts even more pressure on senior leaders to make sure their managers at all levels are getting it right. If they’re not building trust and connecting with their teams, chances are the company’s AI transformation is at risk.
Leaders can see and feel it. The needle is moving
We’re seeing this system play out in the real world. Take our work with senior leaders at a Fortune 50 technology company that, like many others, embarked on a massive AI transformation in recent years.
The leaders in this organization needed a way to build engagement, trust, and connection at scale across their globally distributed, cross-functional teams, yet couldn’t afford to pull managers and teams away from their day-to-day, given the fast pace of change and intensity of managers’ workloads.
By rolling out this system of continuous development with self-serve tools, the organization achieved higher engagement scores across the board, including up to a 30% increase in trust and connection scores and a 20% increase in manager effectiveness. Leaders felt the difference, too, describing that their teams were adapting to change with far more resilience than before.
The same company posted high double-digit revenue growth this past year, which is remarkable in a year when growth has been hard to come by for most.
The numbers were never the point
Most companies are still stuck in an old pattern. They are looking for better response rates and stronger scores on a survey they shouldn’t need to run anymore.
Instead of an annual all-hands and culture committees that don’t lead to any real change, companies can now give every leader a system of action through an AI trainer that understands employees’ needs company wide, helps managers act on them in real time, and ensures that people are engaged and AI transformations are successful.