Article
Employee Surveys: Key for Understanding Organizational Engagement and Ensuring Strategies Stick
Laura Richard, Sylvia Palka Melo, Maicky Meijberg — March 13, 2025
In 2024, only 23%1 of employees worldwide reported feeling engaged in their workplace, highlighting the difficulty of fostering employee commitment to achieve strategic success. Disengaged employees often lack motivation, which hinders their contribution to the organization’s mission, vision, and goals, making strategy implementation nearly impossible.
When designed effectively, employee engagement surveys can offer insights into the root cause of workforce misalignment with organizational objectives. To maximize survey impact, two dimensions should be assessed: Employee Engagement with the Strategy and Employee Perceptions of Organizational Readiness to Deliver the strategy successfully.
Key Dimensions of Measurement
1. Employee Engagement with the Strategy:
- Awareness and Understanding: Assess employees’ awareness of the organization’s strategy and rationale for the decisions that have been made.
- Buy-In: Gauge employees’ belief that the strategy will create value for the organization, and their commitment to contribute to its successful delivery.
- Knowledge: Determine whether employees know how their roles contribute to the strategy, and what changes are needed in their functions to be successful.
2. Employee Perceptions of Organizational Readiness to Deliver:
- Ability to Deliver: Evaluate whether employees feel they have the resources and tools necessary to execute the strategy effectively.
- Reinforcement of Alignment: Assess if employees believe the strategy targets the right priorities for the future.
- Organizational Performance: Assess employees’ perceptions of how well the organization is currently delivering on its strategic goals.
Importance of Measuring Over Time
While a single survey can provide valuable insights, the real strength of employee engagement data lies in ongoing tracking. Year-over-year trends reveal patterns and areas for improvement, providing actionable insights to evolve communications, resource allocation, training and in certain cases, relook the strategy itself.
The Path Forward
At Level5 Strategy, we help organizations engage and align teams through strategy development and implementation. An effectively designed employee survey is a powerful tool to uncover actionable insights at scale. We recommend leaders include questions that explore both the level of engagement with the strategy, and perception of the organization’s readiness to deliver. This data-driven approach ensures alignment positioning the organization to effectively deliver its strategy.
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