Engagement for managers

When your organization sends out an engagement survey, you will receive an email from surveys@15five.com and/or a text message inviting you to participate by clicking on the survey URL. You will also see an action item on your homepage with a link to complete your survey.

Access your engagement survey using the link included in your invite or action item and fill out the survey statements.

After you finish answering survey statements, you'll be asked to share optional feedback about an area that you scored higher or lower than other areas on the survey, giving you the opportunity to expand on why certain topics resonated more with you, or where you feel there’s room for improvement.

As a manager, you play a huge role in driving your team's participation in engagement surveys. We recommend taking the following actions to reach a 100% response rate for your team:

• Lead by Example: Submit your survey early. This shows your commitment to the process and lets you experience the survey firsthand, so you're ready to answer any questions your team may have.

• Announce in Team Meetings: Remind your team about the survey in meetings and on team channels throughout the course of the survey.

• Share the 'Why': Explain the value of their input, such as how survey insights will shape upcoming projects, policies, or team initiatives. Reference our "Engagement for employees" article to learn more about benefits for employees.
• Emphasize Confidentiality: Reassure your team that their responses are confidential and provide clarity on how feedback will be used to drive positive change. Read about 15Five's confidentiality policy for engagement surveys.

• Add to 1-on-1 Agendas: Include the survey as a talking point in your 1-on-1s. This creates an open space for direct reports to ask questions about confidentiality, content, or purpose, helping to alleviate any concerns they may have.

• Set Aside Time to Take the Survey in Calendars: Add a 15-minute block to your team's calendars for them to take the survey. Blocking time off helps your team prioritize completing the survey amidst their other responsibilities.
• Celebrate Milestones: Research indicates that celebrating progress— even small wins— can significantly boost motivation across your workforce. As your team reaches participation milestones (e.g., 50%, 75%), acknowledge their effort and keep up the momentum by sharing how close they are to 100% completion. You can ask admins in your organization to provide you with your team's current completion rate at any point.

As a manager, you'll likely be granted limited access to view engagement results for your team. Once the survey is complete, your leadership team will share these results with you so you can analyze your team's engagement and take meaningful action. For a detailed overview of how to view your team’s results and the reporting options available, proceed to the "Engagement results for managers 📊" section of this article.

Once you've reviewed your team's results, pull out key insights and schedule a time to discuss them with your team. Some key insights you may highlight include:

• Summary Tab: Company engagement level, Team engagement level, Team trends compared to the last survey, Top areas for improvement and celebration
• Statements Tab: Top 5 negative, positive, and overall impact statements for your team
  
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  Tip

  Use the "Pin statements" filter in the top, right-hand corner of the statements table to get this information.

Aim to create an open, supportive environment where team members feel safe discussing engagement and providing additional feedback. For example, here at 15Five, we record most of our team meetings— but never team engagement results meetings. We do this because we want to create a space where employees feel psychological safe to voice their true opinions and feelings without worrying about potential retribution or their words being taken out of context or shared with others outside of the container of the team.

During the meting, focus on the positive results as well as areas for improvement, and invite team members to share their thoughts on the findings. Use this discussion to emphasize your commitment to addressing their feedback and to identify any immediate steps you can take together to enhance team engagement. This transparency builds trust, encouraging a culture of continuous improvement where employees feel valued and heard. 

Action Plans in 15Five are strategic plans that leaders can use to organize and measure the work you're doing to improve outcomes (employee performance, engagement, and/or retention) in your team.

Following survey completion, you'll have the opportunity to create Action Plans based on your team's results to improve the elements detracting from engagement. DO THIS! Gallup warns that failing to act on engagement survey results can lead to lower engagement, higher turnover, and declining response rates in future surveys. By taking specific, targeted action, you demonstrate your commitment to employee feedback, leading to improved morale and sustained engagement. Learn more in the "Action Plans for managers 🚀" section of this article.

If the Manager Effectiveness survey was included in the engagement campaign, your direct reports will respond to statements about how you live out 15Five's Manager Effectiveness Competencies (and you'll do the same for your manager!). These statements help pinpoint key areas for celebration and actionable areas for improvement in the way you lead your team.

When your leadership shares these results with you, take them to heart! Try not to be discouraged if some feedback highlights areas for growth. Instead, view it as an opportunity to strengthen your skills and enhance your impact as a leader. Remember, every piece of feedback is a chance to learn, adapt, and ultimately support your team more effectively. Focus on actionable insights, celebrate your strengths, and embrace development areas with a growth mindset.

The Summary tab provides you with a high-level overview of your team's engagement results.

Here, you can access the following results:

• Engagement score: An overall measurement that reflects three dimensions of your team's engagement: 🎯 focus (ability to work intensely without distraction), 🚀 force (internal drive to contribute positively to the organization), and 💫 feeling (positive emotional state while working).
  
  
  
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  Note

  For a deeper understanding of how the engagement score is calculated, click the “Explain this score" button. You can also find additional details in the FAQs at the end of this article.

• Engagement level: The "bucket" of engagement your engagement score falls into. Options are Disengaged (0-5th percentile), Somewhat engaged (5th-25th percentile), Moderately engaged (25th-75th percentile), Highly engaged (75th-95th percentile), and Extremely engaged (95th-100th percentile).
  
• Engagement percentile: How your team's engagement score ranks compared to all other companies in the 15Five dataset over the past 12 months.
  
• Trends for engagement score, percentile, and participation: How key metrics changed since the last engagement campaign.
  
  
  
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  Note

  "Participation" (AKA "response rate") refers to the % of your team who submitted their surveys.

• Areas to improve and celebrate: Highlights areas for improvement and successes to celebrate within your team based on responses to survey statements. These areas are surfaced using 15Five's Predictive Impact Model, which uses sophisticated machine learning to predict, with high confidence, exactly how much impact statements have on engagement.
  
• Recommended areas for action: Highlights targeted actions, based on key insights from the campaign, that you can use to improve team engagement. Here, you can also create your own custom Action Plans to drive engagement.
  
  
  
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  Recommended areas for action are generated with 15Five's Predictive Impact Model, which uses sophisticated machine learning to predict, with high confidence, exactly how much impact an action will have on engagement.

The Engagement tab allows you to dig deeper into your engagement score. Here, you can access the following results:

• Engagement score: An overall measurement that reflects three dimensions of your team's engagement: 🎯 focus (ability to work intensely without distraction), 🚀 force (internal drive to contribute positively to the organization), and 💫 feeling (positive emotional state while working).
  
  This score is calculated based on responses to 7 questions in the core EngageSurvey, each of which aligns with one of the three dimensions of engagement:
  • 🎯 I am able to get into a state of complete focus while working.
  • 🚀 The work that I do gives me a sense of pride.
  • 🚀 I find my work to be full of meaning and purpose.
  • 💫 I feel a sense of happiness when I am working very hard.
  • 💫 When I wake up, I feel like going to work.
  • 💫 I love the feeling of working.
  • 💫 I find it very easy to stay focused on what is most important for me to accomplish at work.
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  Note

  For a deeper understanding of how the engagement score is calculated, click the “Explain this score" button. You can also find additional details in the FAQs at the end of this article.

• Engagement trend: How your team's engagement score has changed over time.
  
• Engagement flow: A dynamic, timeline-based view of how your team members' engagement levels have shifted over time.
  
• Engagement breakdown: Shows the distribution of engagement levels across your team.
  
  Expand your team's results to see the distribution of how team members responded to the 7 questions used to calculate the Engagement Score.
  

The Statements tab contains the Predictive Impact Model, which uses sophisticated machine learning, trained on 600k+ surveys, to predict exactly how much a specific engagement driver statement affects engagement. This allows you to target improvements to engagement with clear, measurable results. You can view this chart in Heatmap view (shown below) or Table view.

• A score of 0 on the Predictive Impact Model represents the baseline average derived from survey responses across all companies in 15Five’s dataset.
• When a statement’s score is above 0, it indicates a positive impact relative to the baseline (the group is performing better on that statement than the average).
• A negative score means the statement is detracting from engagement relative to the average.

Employer Net Promoter Score (eNPS) is a scoring system designed to help employers measure employee satisfaction and loyalty within their organizations. If the eNPS question ("On a scale from 0-10, how likely are you to recommend [Organization] as a great place to work?") was included in the engagement campaign, you can use the eNPS tab to see how employees responded to it.

Here, you can access the following results:

• eNPS score: A measurement of how your team responded to the eNPS question. Respondents answer this question on a 10-point Likert scale with 0 being very unlikely to 10 being very likely. From there, our system separates ratings into three categories (Promoters, Passives, and Detractors) and calculates the eNPS Score using the formula: eNPS =  % Promoters - % Detractors.
  
  eNPS scores can range from -100 to 100. According to Great Place to Work, a good score is anywhere between 10 and 30, and a score of 30 or greater is considered excellent.
  
  
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  To learn more about how eNPS is calculated, please refer to the FAQs at the bottom of this article.

• Response breakdown: The distribution of eNPS responses across your team. By default, this reporting option is separated into Promoters, Passives, and Detractors. However, you can use the "Show full distribution" option to see what percentage of team members provided each answer (1-10).
  
• eNPS trend: How your team's eNPS score has changed from survey to survey.
  
• eNPS breakdown: Provides an in-depth look at employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) by analyzing response distributions across key employee groups. This report categorizes responses into Promoters, Passives, and Detractors, allowing leaders to see where employee loyalty and advocacy are strongest and where there may be challenges. You can use the "Compare by" filter in the top, right-hand corner of the breakdown chart to view results by group type or demographic data.
  

The Feedback tab contains responses given to all open-ended questions in the survey. Three types of feedback may appear in this section: Dynamic, eNPS, and Custom.

• Dynamic Feedback is gathered at the end of engagement surveys. At this point, participants are asked one of the two engagement driver-specific questions below based on their results. Answers to these questions appear in the Feedback tab.
  • If they responded with more disagreement to a driver, they're asked, "We noticed you rated the following statements lower than other statements. What recommendations do you have on what [Organization] should start or stop doing?"
  • If they responded positively to all drivers, they're asked, "We noticed you rated the following statements higher than other statements. What recommendations do you have on what [Organization] should keep doing?"

  

• Employee Net Promoter Score Feedback: If eNPS is included in an engagement campaign, respondents are asked, "On a scale from 0-10, how likely are you to recommend {Organization Display Name} as a great place to work?" Once they answer, they're asked, "What was the primary reason for your answer?" The answers provided to the second, qualitative question appear in the Feedback tab.
  
• Custom Feedback: If your engagement campaign contained a custom survey that includes qualitative questions, the Feedback tab will include answers provided to those custom questions.

15Five's Best-Self Kickoff is a strategic meeting that aims to help employees and managers understand each other and their work needs, building a stronger working relationship. By exploring questions such as "The type of work I'm interested in and enjoy is…" and "I feel like I'm doing what I was born to do when I…", employees gain clarity on what brings them a sense of purpose. Managers can then use these insights to create a more meaningful work environment, assigning tasks and responsibilities that resonate personally with each team member. This, in turn, builds a greater sense of value and fulfillment as employees feel understood, appreciated, and purposeful in their work.

Help Center article 💡: Hold a Best-Self Kickoff

Assigning the task of creating an individual objective helps employees link their goals with the organization’s mission, giving them a greater sense of purpose and direction. This alignment increases motivation and helps employees see the impact of their contributions.

Help Center article 💡: Create an Objective

Discussing this talking point in your 1-on-1 meeting encourages reflection on meaningful work and reinforces pride in personal contributions.
Help Center article 💡: Hold a 1-on-1 meeting

By assigning the action of giving a high five, you can begin creating a culture of recognition on your team. Recognition validates an employee's efforts and contributions, affirming that their work is valued and important. This acknowledgment helps employees see the impact of their efforts, enhancing their sense of purpose and meaning in their role.

Help Center article 💡: Give a High Five

Encourage employees to find a course or conference to support their growth. This action not only shows investment in their development but also aligns with a sense of purpose and long-term career fulfillment. (Consider providing a budget for these opportunities to show your commitment.)