15Five's Engagement feature is a science-backed survey solution designed to measure workforce engagement and provide actionable insights to enhance it. In this article, we'll cover everything you need to know about Engagement—including its benefits, key components, and best practices— to help you leverage it effectively for success.
In this article, you will learn...
- What is 15Five's Engagement feature? 🌟
- How it works 🧑💻
- How Engagement surveys impact HR Outcomes 🎯
- Key components 🔑
- Roles and confidentiality 👥
- Best practices 💡
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) ❓
Access and availability
⛔️ Required access to Engagement.
👥 This article is relevant to all roles.
📦 This feature is available in the Engage, Legacy Perform, and Total Platform pricing packages.
What is 15Five's Engagement feature? 🌟
15Five's Engagement feature enables leaders to survey employees on their level of engagement. With data-rich insights and built-in AI, it helps leaders quickly identify trends, celebrate successes, and uncover opportunities for improvement—informing future initiatives to boost engagement.
What is employee engagement?
Here at 15Five, we define employee engagement as "the emotional commitment and passion that an employee has towards their work and employer, demonstrated by their willingness to expend discretionary effort to help the organization succeed."
To go a level deeper, we believe that employee engagement is impacted by a person's belief in their organization's goals and values. It is characterized by enthusiasm, dedication, and a willingness to invest effort in work activities.
Engaged employees are...
- Motivated to contribute to the organization’s success 📈
- Feel a sense of purpose and satisfaction in their work 🌟
- Often go above and beyond in their roles 🚀
Did you catch the part of the definition about “helping the organization succeed”? The more an employee is driven by passion and purpose, the more meaning they'll find at work and the more profound the bottom-line impacts will be for the business at large. High levels of engagement typically result in increased productivity, better performance, and lower turnover rates.
Furthermore, engagement is not equal to job satisfaction. Anyone can be satisfied with a job that meets their basic needs and still lack the inspiration and motivation needed to excel— and that’s a big deal. When employees are engaged, a subsequent path to value ensues. That’s a far cry from employees who are merely happy with their employers and satisfied with the work they do.
How engagement ties into the HR Outcomes Dashboard
Increasing employee engagement, along with maximizing employee performance and reducing regrettable turnover, is one of 15Five's key HR Outcomes—critical areas for HR teams to focus on to maximize impact and support business goals.
Completing an organization-wide engagement campaign populates the Engagement Scorecard on the HR Outcomes Dashboard.
In addition to comprehensive reporting capabilities released in November 2024, the HR Outcomes Dashboard also contains the following data insights to help you analyze engagement:
Shows the engagement of current top performers over time.
This visualization shows the comparison of Performance Ratings and Engagement and is intended to display how engaged your top performers are.
- Y-axis (vertical): # of employees.
- X-axis (horizontal): Timeframe by quarter.
- Color key: Engagement level (based on results from engagement surveys).
Shows the flow of active users' engagement statuses over time.
This visualization shows the engagement level of employees within your organization.
- Y-axis (vertical): # of employees.
- X-axis (horizontal): Timeframe by quarter.
- Color key: Engagement level (based on results from engagement surveys).
Every component of the 15Five platform, including the Engagement feature, works cohesively to drive these outcomes within your organization. Our revolutionary HR Outcomes Flywheel approach empowers HR leaders, in partnership with managers, to take scalable actions on measured outcomes that demonstrably impact the business.
How it works 🧑💻
- Participants fill out their engagement surveys. It starts with employees taking a simple survey. Our easy-to-use surveys can be completed from any device in just 6 minutes.
- Leaders analyze results. Once results are in, they can be analyzed by department, team, tenure, demographics, and more using powerful dashboards. With built-in reporting, you can track organization engagement over time and identify strengths and areas of opportunity so you can make data-driven decisions and strategically coach select leaders.
- Leaders take action on results. Using engagement surveys at your organization won't create change unless you use the results to instigate action. Once you've analyzed results, use AI-generated Action Plans to launch specific, actionable plans proven to improve engagement.
- Repeat on a quarterly or bi-annual cadence and continue tracking engagement outcomes over time. We recommend surveying employees 2-4 times a year to track progress. Establishing a cadence upfront allows employee engagement to be part of business planning.
How Engagement surveys impact HR Outcomes 🎯
Holding regular engagement surveys within your organization can have a major impact on 15Five's HR Outcomes: maximizing employee performance, increasing employee engagement, and decreasing regrettable turnover.
- Research shows that engaged employees are 17% more productive than their peers and are more likely to go above and beyond in their work, supporting productivity and innovation within their organizations.
- A study conducted by Deloitte found that 77% of workers have experienced burnout at their current job, and 91% of respondents reported that this stress negatively impacts the quality of their work. Engagement surveys allow you to identify warning signs of burnout, such as low scores in the capacity, rest, and role clarity engagement drivers, and take action to mitigate them before the syndrome worsens. Read more about how help employees with burnout.
- 67% of employees report working harder for a manager who cares about their growth as a professional, and managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units. Reporting options in Engagement allow you to filter results by team so you can identify which managers may benefit from additional training or coaching so they can better support their direct reports and drive performance.
- Engagement surveys help you identify what specific drivers contribute to disengagement so that you can take specific, targeted action to drive engagement within your organization.
- Research from Gallup found that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units, and yet only 35% of managers are engaged with their job. Reporting in Engagement allows you to recognize where your managers are doing well and where they're struggling so you can address issues before they trickle down into manager's teams.
- Engaged employees are 87% less likely to leave their organization than disengaged employees.
- Organizations with high levels of engagement report 24-59% less turnover and a 41% reduction in absenteeism.
Other benefits
- Getting to the root of workload stressors so teams aren’t stretched too thin
- Improving communication from leadership on strategic priorities and how those impact your work directly
- Introducing professional development programs to help with your personal growth
- Cutting down on politics and morale killers to make the office a better place to spend your days
- Understanding uneven management practices and recommending manager coaching
- Improving processes to make your job more efficient
Key components 🔑
Our recommended core EngageSurvey is designed to provide leaders with a full picture of engagement in their organization. It contains 58 statements, including the 7 statements that we use to calculate your organization's Engagement Score and questions used to measure Engagement Drivers. Participants are asked to rate their agreement to each statement question on a 5-scale Likert scale (strongly agree > strongly disagree) and also have the option to provide open-text responses to questions that are automatically generated based how they responded to Driver questions. View the core engagement survey in-app here.
Statements included in the core engagement survey are broken down into four sections:
- Your Work Experience: Asks respondents to reflect on their work experience.
- Organization Leadership: Asks respondents to reflect on the culture of leaders within the organization.
- Your Manager: Asks respondents to reflect on the working relationship they have with their manager.
- Your Coworkers: Asks respondents to reflect on the working relationship they have with their immediate coworkers.
On average, this survey takes 6 minutes to complete. This number of statements, and the "I feel" wording we use, are necessary to statistically cast a net wide enough to highlight high and low engagement within a team.
Engagement reporting makes it easy to decide where to focus your engagement strategy (down to the specific manager) and dive deeper into specific topics such as burnout, DE&I, and remote work. Understand engagement at the company, department, or team level, and slice and dice the data however you want to identify wins and challenges across any demographic. Plus, compare progress over time and against other companies in your industry with benchmarking. Learn more about reporting options in Engagement.
In today’s competitive business landscape, employee engagement is more crucial than ever. Yet, identifying and prioritizing the right areas to improve engagement can be challenging. 15Five’s Predictive Impact Model revolutionizes this process, giving HR leaders and managers precise insights into the factors that influence engagement. Leveraging advanced machine learning, this model allows organizations to make data-driven decisions that drive meaningful improvements in employee satisfaction, productivity, and retention.
Action Plans enable leaders to turn insights into tangible improvements. Based on Predictive Impact Model insights, Action Plans allow HR and managers to target specific engagement drivers and statements with high impact scores, focusing efforts where they will make the biggest difference. Leaders can set clear objectives, assign ownership, and track progress over time, creating accountability and ensuring that engagement efforts are both strategic and measurable. Action Plans bridge the gap between data and action, helping to drive continuous improvement in employee engagement.
We understand that flexibility is key to getting the insights you need. Engagement admins can create custom campaigns to fit the needs of their organization. A custom campaign can include any of the various survey options we offer. You can also create targeted campaigns, which only go out to specific subsets of your organization.
Express surveys allow you to quickly launch an engagement campaign that contains one of our three most popular and science-backed engagement survey: Engagement with Drivers (the Core EngageSurvey), Engagement-only, and Manager Effectiveness. Learn more about each of these survey options.
The Engagement Score is an overall measurement of how engaged employees are within your organization— think of it as a "pulse" on employees’ current emotional and psychological state. This score reflects employees' personal and emotional psychological motivations for their work.
The Engagement Score is based on participant responses to 7 statements:
- 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.
Learn more about the Engagement Score and other reporting options.
Engagement admins have the option to add eNPS (employee Net Promoter Score) to engagement campaigns. When eNPS is added, respondents are asked: "On a scale from 0-10, how likely are you to recommend {Organization Display Name} as a great place to work?". Respondents also have the option to provide an open response to the prompt, "What was the primary reason for your answer?".
Measuring eNPS internally is a good practice for organizations because it provides a simple and effective way to gauge employee satisfaction and engagement and track progress over time.
Once an engagement campaign concludes, you can view breakdown and trending eNPS reporting. Learn more about eNPS in Engagement.
There are 17 drivers that employee engagement research identifies as influencers or "levers" of engagement. These engagement drivers collectively contribute to creating a positive and engaging work environment that promotes employee satisfaction, productivity, and overall organizational success.
Roles and confidentiality 👥
There are two kinds of access in 15Five's Engagement feature: 1) role and 2) results access level. Employees can be given access to Engagement as an employee, leader, Organization Admin, or Engagement Admin (as outlined above). They can also be granted full, limited, or no-results access.
| Role | Description |
|---|---|
| Participant | A person who is included as a participant in an engagement campaign. By default, any employee in 15Five is assigned as an employee in Engage. Can complete engagement surveys, but doesn't have access to the Engage Portal or Engagement survey results. |
| Leader | By default, any manager in 15Five is assigned as a leader in Engage. They have access to the Engage Portal, and may or may not have results access depending on their assigned results access level. |
| Organization admin | Can access the Engage Portal and manage feature settings and employee/group data in Engage. By default, any account admin in 15Five is assigned as an organization admin in Engage. |
| Engagement admin | Has the same permissions as Organization admins plus the ability to create and manage engagement campaigns and view all engagement survey results. |
| Results access level | Permissions |
|---|---|
| Full access | Employees with full access have full visibility into company-wide results and details for all groups. |
| Limited access | Employees with limited access will only see assessment results, feedback, and actions for the groups they have access to. |
| No access | Employees with no access can manage employee and group data, but cannot see results. |
Unbiased and honest survey participation is critical for an organization to receive accurate engagement insights from a survey. For this reason, 15Five intentionally designed our system to provide trust and security to employees. To ensure this, 15Five rigidly enforces our confidentiality policy in a few different ways:
- Participation is confidential: 15Five does not share which employees did or did not participate in an engagement survey. We do, however, allow admins to see the response rates of groups during an engagement campaign.
- No individual survey responses are identified. No one in your organization can see how an individual responded to statements in an engagement survey. Engagement results are only available in aggregate by groups that received no fewer than 3-5 respondents (see "Minimum respondent threshold for engagement results" below for more information).
- Written responses are always anonymous. All written responses, which we call "Dynamic Feedback," are presented anonymously and can only be filtered by a single group type (e.g. by Department). For Dynamic Feedback comments to be available for a group, at least 3-5 employees from that group must have responded to the engagement survey. If the group meets the confidentiality criteria, leaders with results access for that group can read any responses that are received even if we receive fewer than five pieces of Dynamic Feedback.
- Minimum respondent threshold for engagement results. Survey confidentiality within 15Five's Engagement feature prevents engagement data from being displayed for groups with fewer than 3-5 members, or in instances where fewer than 3-5 people from a group respond to an engagement survey. While the default and recommended threshold is 5 respondents, Engagement and Organization Admins have the option to customize the threshold to either 3 or 4 respondents as they configure Engagement feature settings.
Learn more in our "Confidentiality for engagement surveys" article.
Best practices 💡
As renowned management consultant and author Peter Drucker said, "If you can't measure it, you can't improve it." Most organizations report on KPIs at least quarterly, if not more frequently. So why not employee engagement— isn’t it worth the 6 minutes every three months to quantify employee health? Especially when you consider the changes in a quarter— with new employees, new customers, and new business— as well as the loss of employees and customers. Measuring quarterly means you'll never be surprised by shifts in engagement, and you'll always be ahead of the game.
Additionally, the speed of feedback creates a competitive advantage for your leadership team. The more frequently an organization receives feedback, the faster it can evaluate what’s working and what’s not, and then course-correct before it’s too late. Besides, employees who take a survey tend to draw from memories about the past couple of weeks or months, not something that happened a year ago.
Most importantly, employees are happy to give feedback if they see that leadership or manager is listening and acting on it. When a person feels that their feedback matters, they willingly offer it. It is up to your organization's leadership team to push results and action accountability down to managers. When 20 people each do one thing close to their own circle of engagement, actions and culture growth move really fast!
All this said, unique situations and circumstances can arise where it may not make sense not to run a quarterly survey. For example, your organization may choose to alternate between holding performance reviews and running engagement surveys every quarter. That's totally fine! At the end of the day, the most important thing is to ensure that you're using a continuous and consistent approach to driving the behaviors that positively impact your business and receiving and acting on feedback from your employees.
Before sending out a survey, it's important to make sure that employee data is accurate and actionable. Starting with good data integrity will help ensure that your results are accurate and insightful.
Keep these tips in mind as you go through employee, group, and attribute data:
- Consider doing a data clean-up in your HRIS and request employees to update their profiles regularly for any data that they opt-in for (updated locations, demographics, etc).
- If your organization doesn't use an HRIS, do an audit of employee data in 15Five. You can export a CSV of all employee data by clicking Download current structure on the bulk import page in 15Five, make any necessary changes, and then perform a bulk import to get the updated employee data into 15Five.
- Consider any subsets of people you would want to be able to view engagement results for and create groups or attributes that you can use to filter results by. Check out our "People and data management options in 15Five" article for more information about groups and attributes.
- Build your groupings around people responsibility and lines of authority, not around your budget or financial org structure (if the two aren't in alignment). Engagement survey results are nothing if not actionable and meaningfully tied to areas of influence for organizational leaders and teams.
Changing the structure of groups or attributes between surveys will break trending data and prevent you from seeing how engagement is changing over time. Before you launch your first engagement survey, we recommend taking the time to ensure your people data in 15Five is accurate and actionable, then making minimal changes moving forward so that you can view trending data.
Before adding questions to an engagement campaign, ask yourself: is our leadership ready to take action on the items we're asking employees about? Soliciting feedback via an engagement survey is not a toy or a novelty, and comes with some risk of harm. For example, we do not recommend including the "Diversity & Inclusion Progress" survey in an engagement campaign if you haven't consulted with a DEI consultant/expert (can be internal or external) and can't take action on results. Understand your capacity and desire for change before launching a campaign.
If your people aren't responding to engagement surveys, results won't be reflective of engagement within your organization. Think of creative ways to drive up survey rates. For example:
- Have your CEO share posts in a company-wide communication channel highlighting the percentage of people who have already responded, reminding people why participation is important and how easy is it to participate (takes less than 6 minutes and can be completed from any device), and nudging people who haven't yet responded to submit their surveys
- Offer prizes to the teams or departments that reach a 100% response rate
- If you're in an office, post posters around common areas reminding people to participate and sharing the deadline
- Have managers announce the engagement survey in their team meetings or channels.
- Remind people to submit their surveys in as many channels as possible. Oftentimes, people simply forget to submit their surveys— they're not intentionally declining to participate.
- Act on results following an engagement survey. While this suggestion can't be done in the moment, it's vital to ensure that people remember why participation matters and how it can positively impact their work lives.
Our Global Average Response rate is 82% when following our default recommended reminder cadence. This can vary depending on the accuracy and type of contact information, industry, internal promotion efforts, and of course employee perception of action over time. Really work towards pursuing the highest rate possible!
A 2014 study conducted by WorkLeap found that 29% of employees think that engagement surveys are useless. If you ask employees to fill out a survey and then fail to share or act on results, the hidden message being communicated is that the survey is a "tick the box" exercise that isn't important. That said, it's vital for leadership teams to...
Employee engagement surveys are only valuable if their results are analyzed, shared, and acted upon. A WorkLeap study found that 29% of employees view engagement surveys as “useless”— likely because survey results are often collected without follow-through. With 15Five’s enhanced reporting and Predictive Impact Model, your organization can turn survey results into targeted, effective actions that demonstrate commitment to a more engaging workplace. Here’s how:
-
Analyze Engagement Survey Results: With the new reporting tools, take a close look at your engagement data to understand key drivers, strengths, and areas for improvement. Use tools like the Engagement Breakdown and Predictive Impact Scores to focus on the statements most influencing engagement, then identify trends and opportunities by department, team, or demographic.
-
Create Targeted Action Plans: Based on these insights, create focused Action Plans around areas with the highest impact. 15Five’s Action Plans allow you to target specific drivers, assign ownership, and set goals to address issues that matter most to employees. Managers can also create Action Plans tailored to their teams, addressing group-specific needs based on high-impact data.
-
Communicate Results and Action Plans: Share both the survey results and the organization’s action plan with employees, reinforcing that their input drives real change. Present key findings in an all-hands meeting or department meetings, and outline how leadership and managers will act on specific results to make a positive impact on the workplace.
-
Report Back on Progress and Success: Keep employees informed about the progress of post-survey actions with regular updates, whether monthly or quarterly, via company-wide channels or meetings. When announcing future surveys, remind employees of actions taken based on their feedback—reinforcing that their voices matter and encouraging participation.
Following each engagement survey, managers can now leverage 15Five’s predictive insights and targeted recommendations to address specific drivers that impact engagement within their teams. 15Five’s new reporting capabilities, including Predictive Impact Scores, make it easy for leaders to create data-driven, impactful Action Plans based on real employee feedback.
15Five’s HR Outcomes Dashboard provides a reliable way for HR executives to consistently capture, synthesize, and present the outcomes they are measuring and working to improve: manager effectiveness, employee engagement, employee performance, and regrettable turnover. This allows HR leaders to show clear and concise data that directly links programs like employee learning and development to outcomes like employee retention, which can, in turn, be connected to business outcomes like customer satisfaction and revenue.
As you configure the HR Outcomes Dashboard, you can choose to pull in data from engagement surveys in the following ways:
- You can measure Employee Engagement using your organization's most recent Engagement Score.
- You can include scores from your organization's most recent Manager Effectiveness Survey in the calculate of your organization's Manager Effectiveness Indicator.
Pulling engagement survey data into the HR Outcomes Dashboard gives you a fuller picture of employee engagement and allows you to see how HR initiatives impact engagement within your organization.
Additional resources 📝
- Quick-launch guide: Launch an engagement campaign
- Create an engagement campaign
- Configure Engagement feature settings
- Analyze engagement results using the HR Outcomes Dashboard
- Predictive Impact Model: Tool Overview
- Action Plans: Tool Overview
- Confidentiality for engagement surveys
- Engagement for employees
- Engagement for managers
You can access role-specific Engagement articles by navigating to the "Using 15Five" section of the Help Center, selecting your role, and then clicking "📋 Engagement surveys."
- Engagement Survey Prep & Launch for Admins
- Engagement Survey Analysis (COMING SOON!)
- Engagement for Managers (COMING SOON!)
- Fireside Chat with VaynerMedia Chief Heart Officer, Claude Silver (60 min): Join 15Five co-founder Shane Metcalf and VaynerMedia's Claude Silver as they discuss how to be the kind of leader who can fix what's broken, turn any team into a winning team, and help the people around you be better and do better. Join the revolution and learn how to be a heart centered leader who uses emotional optimism as a tool for change within your life and work.
- Why Engagement is the Key to High Performance and Reaching Your Full Potential (60 min): Join 15Five's Courtney Bigony, MAPP, and Jeff Smith, Ph.D., as they introduce a new and differentiated approach to engagement that measurably unlocks the potential of your workforce.
- Engagement, Elevated: New Ways to Identify and Engage High Performers (60 min): Top performers are vital to every company’s success. Now more than ever organizations are scrambling to define outstanding performance, while also rewarding and recognizing the employees who consistently move the needle forward. In this webinar, Jennie Yang, VP of People & Culture at 15Five, and Vince Huang, former Chief Product Officer at 15Five, sit down and discuss innovative ways for organizations to identify and engage their high performers.
- 15Five Insights for Executives: The Employee Engagement Trends Report: In this eBook, we analyzed engagement data for nearly 13,000 employees and distilled our findings into actionable takeaways, insights, and tips to help you understand and drive employee engagement.
- Your 6-Step Guide to Boosting Employee Engagement: In this guide, we map out the six steps an organization should take to consistently increase their employee engagement over time.
-
The Power of Engagement: Measuring Behaviors that Fuel Performance: Employee engagement is vital to keeping your business afloat and an important metric for leaders to focus on. But most organizations are measuring factors that don’t impact engagement and definitely don’t impact performance. In this eBook, you’ll discover how you can measure behaviors that drive engagement and support your people in reaching their full potential.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) ❓
There's a lot of science behind this! We spend time with university psychologists, we review scholarly research, and we validate survey scales in the marketplace to have the most effective standardized survey questions. Every question is intentionally worded. We run reliability and validity tests regularly. In total, there are about 55 Likert scale statements in the core EngageSurvey, which take an average of 6 minutes to complete. From these questions, we show results for the important components of engagement related to the work itself, the relationships around the work, and the mission/impact of the org. Our methodology strongly recommends sending this survey 3-4x/year--so the questions might start to feel familiar--as this allows us to trend results for your leaders so they can tell what's working and what's not.
Science 🔬: Reliability and Validity of the Engagement Score Questions