Your Engagement Survey Is Lying to You

Most organizations aren’t short on data – quite the opposite, really.

Many of our clients are rich in data, with strong annual engagement survey participation rates, stable scores, and positive trends. And on paper, their results look fine, positive even. But when we start listening more closely, a different picture often emerges. A quieter, more complex one.

The gap between what surveys say and what employees experience is widening, and this disconnect isn’t just a matter of measurement – it’s increasingly a performance, retention, and risk issue.

Across Canada, employee engagement scores have remained relatively consistent in recent years. But stability isn’t the same as strength, and the data doesn’t lie:

• Only 23% of employees worldwide report being engaged at work, while the majority are either disengaged or actively detached (Gallup, 2026).

• Meanwhile, approximately 21% of Canadian workers report high or very high levels of work-related stress and burnout, with higher rates among those in public-facing roles (Statistics Canada, 2023).

• Public sector employees also report declining perceptions of leadership responsiveness and workplace well-being in large-scale surveys such as the Public Service Employee Survey (Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, 2022).

What this tells us is simple: surveys aren’t capturing the full picture. Time and time again, we see the same patterns:

• Participation rates are declining;

• “Neutral” responses are rising;

• Open-text comments tell a very different story; and

• Some voices, especially equity-deserving groups, are not showing up fully in the data.

Surveys still matter. But on their own, they’re often a lagging indicator of what’s really happening inside an organization. And when that’s your only lens, it’s easy to miss the signals that matter most.

Research shows that 70% of team engagement is attributable to the manager, highlighting that declines in manager engagement are driving overall drops in employee engagement (Gallup, 2026). They shape day-to-day experience more than anything else, but without the right supports, expectations don’t always translate into practice.

That’s when culture stops being a matter of values and starts becoming an operational risk. You see it manifest in slower decision-making, weaker collaboration, rising burnout rates, and increasing turnover, particularly among high-performing employees.

Globally, nearly 4 in 10 workers report plans to look for a new job in the near future, indicating high voluntary turnover intentions (Robert Half Canada, 2024). In public-sector and service-oriented organizations, this has serious implications, such as diminished service quality, loss of institutional knowledge, and added strain on already overburdened teams.

And the impacts aren’t abstract. They can directly impact an organization’s capacity to deliver on its mandate. The organizations navigating this well aren’t abandoning surveys; they’re putting them in context by:

• Triangulating data;

• Emphasizing lived experience;

• Empowering managers as culture carriers; and

• Acting on what they hear, quickly and visibly.

For organizations looking to move beyond surface-level insight, the starting point is pretty simple. You need to start asking the important questions:

• Where do gaps exist between what your data says and what you are hearing informally?

• Whose experiences are missing from your data?

• How uniform are employee experiences throughout the organization?

Because if your engagement survey is your only window into your workplace, you’re not seeing the full picture. And, increasingly, what you’re not seeing is exactly where the risk (and the opportunity) lives.

References

Gallup. (2026). State of the Global Workplace 2023 report. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx 

Statistics Canada. (2023). Work-related stress among Canadians. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/230619/dq230619c-eng.htm 

Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat. (2022). Public Service Employee Survey, 2022. https://www.canada.ca/en/treasury-board-secretariat/services/innovation/public-service-employee-survey/2022-23.html 

Robert Half. (2025). New survey reveals nearly 4 in 10 workers planning a job change. https://press.roberthalf.ca/2025-01-30-New-survey-reveals-nearly-4-in-10-workers-planning-a-job-change-in-first-half-of-2025