Research Drop: Empowering Managers to Take Action on Survey Results & Insights

We sometimes work in an environment where we are overwhelmed with data points, and it can be tricky to know how to focus on the most relevant and important data points. This can be especially difficult for managers, who are responsible for the experiences and performance of their teams in addition to their own job responsibilities. One source of valuable information for managers is employee feedback, often embodied in survey data and insights. But do managers feel equipped to understand and act on this feedback?

Inspired by our customers’ most important questions, our latest research looks at how managers interpret and act on employee survey feedback. The Viva People Science team conducted a study with 703 U.S. managers across 10 industries, each supervising at least five direct reports, to gain a deeper understanding of their experiences, from common practices to barriers when it comes to acting on employee feedback. The findings uncovered three key areas:

1. Characteristics of Critical Data and Insights: Managers emphasize the importance of relevant and contextual data to drive action, especially in operational tasks, as it is seen as a critical element in gaining the right insights.
2. Survey topics vary depending on their perceived feasibility. Survey topics vary in their perceived ability to drive action. Some topics are seen as strategic opportunities when assessed for ease of improvement and control, while others are seen as broader organizational challenges.
3. The formal action-taking process does not guarantee action. Managers tend to engage in informal action plans, citing insight, effort, and tools as key barriers. There is a clear opportunity to invest in high-value resources that are inconsistently available in the organization.

Let’s now look at each of these important areas in more detail.

Characteristics of Critical Data and Insights

When thinking about what types of data and insights managers access and consume, it can be helpful to think about 1) what activities they want to use the data for, and 2) what characteristics make the data actionable. In our survey, we asked managers to select the top activities for finding the right data and insights.

The top three activities that surfaced in our sample were: Operational based activities – These basic activities that managers are often expected to perform. What we found here is that managers are looking for data to enhance their ability to be effective managers and to drive team performance and productivity. We also saw that relational activities such as advocating for teams and providing recognition ranked low on the list. This suggests that while these are still important managerial behaviors, managers are not relying heavily on data to perform them.

We also asked managers to select key features that would enable them to leverage data and insights.

As you can see from the table, relevance was the most important characteristic (by almost 10 percentage points) in making data and insights feel actionable to managers. Without this connection, managers may not understand what is expected of them in terms of taking action on irrelevant information. The second most important characteristic was two Organizational Purpose-Based CharacteristicsIt also indicates that managers want to contextualize data and insights to fit the broader goals, values, and priorities of the organization. This helps inform the ‘why’ of acting on these data and insights and how they lead to broader initiatives.

Survey topics vary depending on their perceived feasibility.

There are a variety of topics that can be asked about in a company survey (e.g., growth, recognition, culture), so we wanted to understand how easy it is for managers to make meaningful improvements on these topics, and how empowered they are to take action to do so. We presented managers with a list of survey topics and asked them to rate 1) how easy it is for them to influence the topic, and 2) how much control they feel they have over the topic. Below you can see these topics, along with their average “Ease of Use” and “Control” scores.

We found four categories of topics based on how managers felt about the topic.

• Easy job for administrators: Something that is easy to improve and under the control of an administrator can help you achieve quick wins and maintain momentum.
• Strategic Challenges: Although still under the control of the managers, it is considered more difficult to change the trend and momentum may be challenged.
• Collective effort: Located in the middle of comfort and control, these topics require coordination and often rely on more business-level leadership.
• Organized business: It is a topic that is outside of management’s control and difficult to improve, and is often considered an organization-wide initiative.

When we review these buckets alongside historical data on critical activities, we find that there is strong overlap between the strategic imperative bucket and the top activities (e.g., prioritization, collaboration/performance) that managers report needing the right data and insights for. In other words, there is a sweet spot for activities that are important to managers but not necessarily the easiest to impact and make lasting progress on, and organizations may want to consider providing additional support or layers of data.

A formal action-taking process does not guarantee action.

We wanted to better understand the current manager experience from data collection to action implementation to identifying improvements. To do this, we asked managers how they think about their organizational practices around action implementation, how many action implementation behaviors they have taken in the past six months, and what their biggest barriers and resources are to this process.

What we found was that while managers were supportive of their organizations’ practice of implementing behavioral processes, the presence of formal processes did not guarantee action. Most managers reported difficulty in turning insights into action.

Less than half of the managers sampled for this study reported engaging in the following activities: some action It has to do with what we did after receiving the survey results and insights. In addition to the numbers above, we also looked at:

• Only 42% of managers reported recognizing their team’s progress.
• Only 38% of managers reported sharing key survey findings and insights with their teams.
• Only 25% of managers reported linking action plans to broader business goals.
• Only 21% of managers reported conducting pulse surveys to assess progress.

What this tells us is that while managers have formal action processes in their organizations, they are likely to feel that they do not have adequate resources or time to engage in action-taking behavior. To explore this further, we asked managers what barriers they felt they faced when trying to act on the survey results and insights.

The top three types of barriers reported by managers were related to insight experience, the amount of effort required, and the tools currently available to take action.

• Improving the relevance of your insights: Managers feel that the topics being asked of them are beyond their control. As we have seen, the level of controllability of topics varies, and it can be difficult to take action when a topic feels out of scope. Organizations should focus on more targeted insights that address topics that managers are empowered to take action on.
• Increased confidence: Managers may feel overwhelmed trying to maintain momentum for behavioral performance between survey cues, and not seeing how others are engaging can affect their motivation to prioritize behavioral performance. Organizations should focus on increasing managers’ confidence in the behavioral performance experience by providing cross-team support and opportunities for collaboration, making it an investment for their teams and the organization as a whole.
• Activate tool: Managers are looking for additional tools to help with the action-taking process. There may be formal processes in place, but they may not be aligned with formal tools that support managers’ efforts. Organizations should focus on increasing their investment in centralizing tools to track, request feedback, and keep action-taking behaviors up to date.

As managers think about reducing these barriers to taking action, it’s important to consider what resources are most valuable to them to help them take action. It’s also important to consider what resources they would like to have to further enhance their experience. We asked managers to tell us about the resources they currently have and the resources they value (whether they currently have them or not).

What we’ve seen is that managers are generally receiving the most valuable resources: templates, action recommendations, training on how to take action, and examples of how to take action. The opportunities for organizations to consider further exploration are in the areas of resources to invest in. These are high-value resources that organizations provide less frequently (e.g., Gen AI tools, targeted insights, ways to collaborate on the action planning process). In these investment opportunities, we see the biggest barriers and similarities that managers face in those insight and tool categories. What we can learn from this data is how to optimize our investment areas to better support managers who are trying to take action based on the survey results and insights. This will help us clarify which resources to focus on and which barriers we can try to reduce.

See how we presented some of these findings in our recent Ask the Experts series on activating managers and identifying insights in reports.Viva Glint: Ask the Experts – Microsoft Adoption) and look forward to future research from the Viva People Science team!