🚨 Alert
This article explains how to analyze engagement results using legacy reporting options, which will be sunset in 2025. As of November 2024, leaders can access new and improved engagement results through the HR Outcomes Dashboard.
Launching an engagement survey is a pivotal first step in understanding your employees, but it's the insights drawn and actions taken from the results that truly drive transformation. This article is designed to guide users on how to view, understand, and act on engagement survey results. By harnessing this knowledge, you can make informed decisions that foster meaningful change within your organization.
In this article, you will learn...
- How to access results for an engagement campaign
- How to analyze the Engagement Score
- How to analyze Engagement Drivers
- Other available results
Access and availability
⛔️ Required access to Engagement results.
👥 This article is relevant to Engagement admins and any individual with results access.
📦 This feature is available in the Engage, Legacy Perform, and Total Platform pricing packages.
Access results for an engagement campaign
- Click on Engagement in 15Five's main, left-hand navigation.
- Find the completed campaign you want to view results for and click View results to its right.
- You'll be directed to the campaign's Results page. Here, you'll have the option to navigate between six tabs: Engagement, Drivers, Heatmap, eNPS, Statements, and People. Continue reading for information about what results are available in each of these tabs.
-
View group-level results: Depending on your level of results access, you may have the option to view results for a specific group(s). Group-level reporting (i.e. when filtering results by departments, locations, reports to, generations, tenures, ethnicities, etc.) is different than organization-level reporting and allows you to dig into how engaged specific subsets of people are. You can apply filters using the +Add Filter button at the top of a results page.
Tip
When reviewing engagement results, it's important to consider that even when something seems "out of your control" (e.g. industry, job market, an employee's geographic location), there's always something you can lean into to help influence it positively. 15Five offers two tools you can utilize to identify data-based actions your team can take to improve engagement following an engagement campaign: Action Plans and the "Insights" tab of the HR Outcomes Dashboard.
Analyze Engagement Score using the Engagement tab
Overview
The Engagement Score is an overall measure of how engaged employees are within your organization that reflects employees' personal and emotional psychological motivations for their work (the micro/day-to-day experience).
Analyze Engagement Score results
In the "Engagement" results tab, you will see your organization's Engagement Score for this survey, your company's Engagement Level, where you rank on a percentile basis across all organizations in 15Five at the time your survey ran, and how your organization compares to other companies in your industry.
Engagement Score
The Engagement Score is an overall measurement of how engaged employees are within your organization.
Available in both organization and group results.
The Engagement Score can be thought of as a "pulse" on employees’ current emotional and psychological state. This score reflects employees' personal and emotional psychological motivations for their work (the micro/day-to-day experience).
The Engagement Score is based on 7 questions included in 15Five's standard engagement survey:
- The work that I do gives me a sense of pride.
- I feel a sense of happiness when I am working very hard.
- I find it very easy to stay focused on what is most important for me to accomplish at work.
- I find my work to be full of meaning and purpose.
- When I wake up, I feel like going to work.
- I am able to get into a state of complete focus while working.
- I love the feeling of working.
Employees are asked these questions on a 5-point agreement scale (strongly agree, agree, neither agree nor disagree, disagree, strongly disagree). Each response is then converted into a value of 0-4 for the purpose of calculating the overall engagement score. All employee responses are weighted equally.
Engagement Level
The Engagement Level shows your organization's level of engagement and a percentage of how your organization ranked in comparison to all other organizations in the 15Five database.
Available in both organization and group results.
Below the Engagement Score, you'll see your organization's Engagement Level, which is based on average Engagement Scores in 15Five's database. Each of the vertical dotted lines in the visual represents a different Engagement level bracket: from left to right, the dotted vertical lines signify the 5th, 25th, 75th, and 95th percentiles.
Possible Engagement Levels are as follows:
- Highly Disengaged (0-5th percentile): Organizations that score in the bottom 5% of our Engagement Score database have employees who are highly disengaged with their work. This can have a significant impact on an organization by impacting turnover, profits, and productivity.
- Disengaged (5th-25th percentile): Organizations that score in the bottom 25% of our Engagement Score database have employees who are disengaged with their work. When employees are disengaged, they are not bringing their full selves to work which affects how they focus in their roles, interact with teammates, and contribute within the organization.
- Moderately Engaged (25th-75th percentile): Organizations that score in the middle 50% of our Engagement Score database have employees who are moderately engaged in their work. We describe employees who are moderately engaged as satisfied, but there is still room for them to become engaged and lean into their work.
- Highly Engaged (75th-95th percentile): Organizations that score in the top 25% of our Engagement Score database have employees who are highly engaged with their work. Highly engaged employees take initiative in their role, have less drama with coworkers, and work to benefit the organization and its purpose.
- Extremely Engaged (95th-100th percentile): Organizations that score in the top 5% of our Engagement Score database have employees who are extremely engaged with their work. Extremely engaged employees positively impact an organization by decreasing turnover, increasing profits, and improving productivity.
Tip
While it can be helpful to know where your company stands compared to other companies, the most important thing is to focus on your own organization's improvements over time (using "Engagement Score Trend" reporting). Take note of your score, and then turn your attention to the actions you are going to take to increase your score over time so your employees feel more connected to the company.
Industry Benchmark Comparison
Industry Benchmark Comparison shows how your organization ranked in comparison to other organizations in your selected industry benchmark.
Available only in organization results.
If you selected an Industry Benchmark in your organization's Engagement feature settings, there will be a data point below the Engagement Score that shows how your organization's Engagement Score ranked in comparison to those of organizations in the same industry. This is the only area of results where industry context is added.
This percentile is calculated using the average Engagement Scores from all the campaigns that organizations in your industry have completed. The Engagement Score from your current campaign is compared against this average.
Tip
While it can be helpful to know where your company stands compared to other companies, the most important thing is to focus on your own organization's improvements over time (using "Engagement Score Trend" reporting). Take note of your score, and then turn your attention to the actions you are going to take to increase your score over time so your employees feel more connected to the company.
Engagement Score Trend
The Engagement Score Trend allows you to see how your Engagement Score changes over time.
Available in both organization and group results.
The trend graph shows trends over time for your organization's past campaigns that used the same surveys as the campaign you're viewing results.
Tip
Refer to this section survey-after-survey to measure how your Engagement Score changes as leaders launch initiatives and complete action plans that target areas of opportunity.
Engagement Breakdown and Flow
The Engagement Breakdown and Flow show which buckets of engagement employees fall into, both for the current survey and over time.
Available in both organization and group results.
The Engagement Breakdown and Flow sections allows you to see where employees fall in the different levels of engagement (Highly Disengaged, Disengaged, Moderately Engaged, Highly Engaged, Extremely Engaged), each of which is represented by a different color. This data is displayed for the current engagement campaign and includes trending data for the previous three campaigns that used the same surveys as your current campaign. You can see the engagement flow breakdown by either Count (#) or Percent (%).
When viewing organization results in count view, hover over any bracket to reveal the flow of employees into and/or out of that bracket.
Tip
Ideally, you want to see people shift from lower levels of engagement (reds) to higher levels (gold and greens). Use the count view to understand whether employees are actively moving into higher or lower levels of engagement.
To protect confidentiality, you will not see which individuals fell into which bucket, but you will see a basic count or percentage of where employees have gone. You may see an upward dark gray line (representing employees who have left the organization since the previous cycle) or a downward blue line (representing new hires who have entered since the last survey). That said, due to confidentiality for engagement surveys, you will not see the blue line if fewer than 3-5 (depending on confidentiality settings) new hires entered any specific bucket.
View Scores by
The View Scores By section allows you to compare scores for different subsets of respondents.
Available in both organization and group results.
The View Scores By section allows you to review and compare the scores for multiple segments by selecting an attribute from the dropdown menu. Once you select an attribute in the "View Scores By" field, the visual will show a list of all groups contained within that attribute, their Engagement Score, the change in score since the last campaign, the group's response rate, and what percentage of the group fell into each engagement level.
Tip
Use this reporting option to gain insight into which groups are leaders in certain areas of the business.
Analyze Driver results using the Drivers and Heatmap tabs
Overview
Engagement Drivers are predictive areas of employees' work environment and experience. 15Five's engagement model includes 17 Drivers that employee engagement research identifies as influencers or "levers" of engagement, each of which is measured based on 2-3 specific statements in the core EngageSurvey. Drivers represent areas that the company has control over— in other words, the mechanisms leadership manipulates to influence work experience and ultimately impact engagement. The score and Influence for each driver help organizations determine what is contributing to engagement and what can be acted on to improve engagement.
- Autonomy
- Capacity
- Coworker relationships
- Fairness
- Feedback
- Goal support
- Leader availability
- Leader integrity
- Manager
- Meaning
- Professional development
- Psychological safety
- Purpose
- Rest
- Role clarity
- Shared values
- Utilization
Read more about our Engagement Drivers, including actions to take to increase driver scores.
Analyze Driver results
In the "Drivers" results tab, you will see Focus Areas and Engagement Drivers information including Sphere, Score, Influence, and Change. In all sections, you can click on a Driver's name to see its description and which survey statements were used to measure it. You can click Learn more about the driver to open driver-specific reporting.
Focus Areas
The Focus Areas section shows you which drivers have the most impact on your organization's engagement.
Available in both organization and group results.
The Focus Areas section intelligently picks the drivers that have the most impact on your organization's engagement. Strengths and Struggles are selected based on a Driver's score and how important the Driver is for your employees to feel engaged with their work. These areas can be used to target issues and guide action efforts to improve engagement.
Strengths represent what is going well for your group and contributing to engagement. Survey responses indicate that employees recognize these as positive aspects of their work environment. Keep up your efforts in these areas!
Struggles are the areas that require the greatest focus for your group. Based on the score of these drivers and their influence on engagement, improving these areas should have the most impact on increasing the overall Engagement Score.
Note
Sometimes you may notice that a driver with a positive score may display as a Struggle. This is because this driver highly impacts engagement, and even though the score is positive, improvements in this area will likely have the greatest impact on engagement.
Tip
Check out our "Engagement Drivers" article for actionable steps you can take to impact Drivers.
Sphere
Spheres separate Drivers into categories related to employees' work experience and relationships.
Available in both organization and group results.
Questions in the EngageSurvey are separated into four (4) "Spheres of experience" based on the environments at work that influence employees: Work Experience, Leadership, Manager, and Coworkers. Learn more about Spheres of experience.
You can see which Sphere a Driver falls into by looking at the "Spheres" column in the "Engagement Drivers" table. You can also sort Drivers using this column.Score
Driver Scores show which drivers are contributing positively to engagement and which can be acted on to improve engagement.
Available in both organization and group results.
Driver Scores indicate how your organization is performing in each of 15Five's 17 Drivers of engagement. Unlike the Engagement Score, Driver scores are presented in relation to an Engagement Index. This index reflects the average response to each Driver using data from a sample set of data from our global database. We use an index to score Drivers so we can account for natural human bias and sentiment in survey responses. Simply put, the index shows the common response to each driver.
Each Driver has its own index value. The index values are static (i.e. they do not change over time) and are based on many thousands of inputs from the EngageSurvey.
When filling out engagement surveys, employees report how much they agree or disagree with the 2-3 survey statements related to each driver on a 5-point agreement scale (strongly agree, agree, neither agree nor disagree, disagree, strongly disagree). For each Driver, we average participant responses to these statements against a 10-point numerical scale for comparison. This number is then benchmarked against 15Five's comprehensive global database average. Your score indicates how many points above or below this global average your result is.
Colors are used to depict how positive or negative the score is compared to what we typically see. The closer to red, the more negative, and the closer to dark blue, the more positive. Gray is average.
Tip
While scores typically range between -4 and +4, extreme cases can occasionally fall outside this spectrum. If you notice that one of your Drivers is scored outside of this typical range, it's important to pay special attention to that Driver and reflect on why it's an outlier. Check out our "Engagement Drivers" article for actionable steps on how to positively impact Drivers.
Influence
Influence bubbles show how correlated individual Drivers are to your organization's overall engagement.
Available only in organization results.
Influence bubbles show how much influence individual Drivers have on your organization's Engagement Score— that is, how important/correlated the Driver is to the engagement of your employees.
A big, filled-in Influence bubble indicates that the Driver is highly correlated with engagement at your organization, and changes for this Driver are more likely to impact your Engagement Score. A small Influence bubble indicates that the Driver is not as well correlated with engagement at your organization, and changes for this driver are less likely to influence your Engagement Score.
Influence bubbles are based on statistical analysis (Pearson bivariate correlation), between the individual driver and the organization's Engagement Score, just using results for this survey. A Driver's Influence is only calculated at the organization level and will not change as you look at different filters or groupings in your results.
Example
If your organization mostly employs at-home caregivers, you may notice that the "Coworker Relationships" Driver has a low score and its influence bubble is small. This could be because statements in the EngageSurvey about Coworker Relationships might not be as applicable to engagement for your employees. They likely knew when they were onboarded that they were committing to working alone and, as a result, didn't expect to be close friends with their coworkers. In this case, Coworker Relationships aren't paramount (or highly correlated) to their engagement, so the Driver's Influence will be small, even though its score is low.
Tip
As a general rule, your leadership team should focus post-survey actions/efforts on Drivers that have larger dots as increases in these Drivers will 1) allow you to more quickly and easily impact your organization's Engagement Score, and 2) be more noticed and appreciated by your employees.
Change
The % change shows you how Driver scores changed since your last campaign.
Available in both organization and group results.
The "Change" column in the "Engagement Drivers" table shows the percentage change in each Driver's score compared to your organization's last campaign.
You can use the trend graph to the far right-hand side of the table to view the change in Driver scores over the past four campaigns that used the same survey as the campaign you're viewing results for.
Tip
Drivers that decreased since your last survey or across several surveys as noted in the trendline are areas to keep an eye on. These may be areas in which employees are experiencing aspects of engagement differently than before. If a Driver has a negative score, high influence, and is trending down, use it as an area to prioritize for focus.
Heatmap
The Heatmap tab allows you to visualize how specific subsets of your organization scored in Drivers.
The Heatmap tab in results allows you to view and compare Driver scores for groups within your organization. Results reflect group membership at the time the survey was run.
- Scores that are above the index (0 to +4) are displayed in blue and indicate that those drivers are strong in the work environment.
- Scores that are below the index (-4 to 0) are displayed in orange and indicate that those drivers could be improved.
Hover over a box in the Heatmap to view trends over time.
Tip
Use this reporting option to determine areas of celebration and improvement for your organization. Filter by managers to see which managers may benefit from additional training and which managers could potentially be utilized as resources or mentors as you work to increase engagement.
Other available results
In addition to the Engagement Score and Drivers, you can analyze the following results upon completion of an engagement campaign:
Response Rate
The Response Rate shows you what percentage of employees submitted their engagement surveys.
Available in both organization and group results.
The Response Rate, located in the header's far right-hand side, allows you to see the percentage of participants that submitted their surveys. Click What is the trend? to view a trend of response rates.
The response rate average varies by industry, but it is important to strive for a high response rate (80% or above) so your leadership team can make informed decisions about how to act on results.
Tip
Response rate is an indicator of employee engagement: in cases where the response rate is low, there's likely a need to be more intentional with your engagement strategy and communication. Low response rates can also be an indicator that employees don't feel comfortable sharing their thoughts. In this case, it's important to communicate that employee anonymity is protected by confidentiality standards and to work on building up psychological safety within your organization. You can refer to the "Psychological Safety" Driver score in Driver reporting to see whether or not those who did respond feel that they can show and employ their true selves at work without fear of negative consequences to self-image, status, or career.
eNPS
The eNPS tab allows you to see the eNPS score and response breakdown for answers given to the eNPS survey statement.
The eNPS tab contains the eNPS score and response breakdown for answers given to the eNPS survey statement ("On a scale from 0-10, how likely are you to recommend {Organization Display Name} as a great place to work?").
This section does not contain open-ended responses given to the optional written eNPS statement ("What was the primary reason for your answer?"). Written comments can be accessed in the Feedback tab.
Learn more about eNPS and reporting options in our "Add eNPS to an engagement campaign" article.
Statements
The Statements tab allows you to explore the distribution of answers given to statements included in an engagement campaign.
The Statements tab allows you to explore the distribution of answers given to statements included in an engagement campaign. Seeing which statements your employees resonated with— or didn't resonate with— can enable you to pinpoint which areas to focus on to improve engagement across your organization. Learn more in our "See how employees responded to engagement campaign statements" article.
Note
Your organization will not receive an engagement score or have access to drivers, heatmap, and other reporting for custom surveys. Additionally, custom surveys do not support trending data.
People
The People tab allows you to see information about the employees who were asked to complete a survey in the engagement campaign.
The People tab displays the name, email address, and/or phone number of all employees who were asked to participate in the engagement campaign.
Dynamic Feedback
Dynamic Feedback reporting allows you to view open-ended comments provided by respondents about Drivers.
In Dynamic Feedback reporting, accessible in the left-hand navigation of the Engage Portal, you can view qualitative feedback that respondents provided about a specific engagement driver. You can also use the 15Five AI tool to summarize Dynamic Feedback based on Driver theme. Learn how to view Dynamic Feedback.
In short, Dynamic Feedback refers to open-ended, written feedback provided to one of two questions:
-
Improvement: If an employee responded negatively to questions about a specific Driver, we ask them about their recommendations to improve it (i.e. "We noticed you rated the following statements lower than other statements. What recommendations do you have on what [Organization] should start or stop doing?").
-
Maintain: If an employee responded positively to all Drivers, we ask about the Driver they had the most agreement with to see what they would like to see the organization keep doing in that area (i.e. "We noticed you rated the following statements higher than other statements. What recommendations do you have on what [Organization] should keep doing?").
You can use Dynamic Feedback reporting to provide context into Driver scores and help determine possible actions to take following the survey to increase engagement.
FAQs
Your organization's Engagement Score and Driver scores are calculated differently, but they correlate with each other.
- Engagement Score is calculated by how employees answered a series of seven (7) statements in the EngageSurvey.
- Individual Driver scores are calculated based on how employees responded to the 2-3 statements related to that Driver.
While the seven (7) statements that dictate the Engagement Score are not intrinsically actionable themselves, drivers were created as the actionable levers organizations can use to influence the Engagement Score. Driver scores provide context into why your Engagement Score is what it is. You can leverage Driver-specific reporting to identify which areas you should focus your energy and efforts on post-survey to have the highest impact on your organization's Engagement Score. Once you identify these areas of focus, you can take action.