We work in environments that can sometimes feel overly inundated with data points and knowing how to focus our scope on the most relevant and critical data points can be tricky. This can be especially difficult for managers, as they are faced with the responsibility of their team’s experience and performance in addition to their own job responsibilities. A source of information of high value to managers is employee feedback, which often takes shape in survey data and insights. But do managers feel equipped to understand and act on this feedback?

Inspired by questions that are top of mind for our customers, our latest research explores how managers interpret and act on employee survey feedback. The Viva People Science team conducted a study with 703 US-based managers across 10+ industries, each overseeing at least five direct reports, to gain a deeper understanding of their experience, from common practices to barriers when it comes to acting on employee feedback. The findings revealed three critical areas:

Qualities of critical data and insights: Managers emphasize the importance of relevant, context-specific data to drive action, particularly for operational tasks, which they view as critical for having the right insights.
Survey themes vary in perceived actionability: Survey topics vary in their perceived ability to drive action. When evaluated by ease of improvement and control, some themes emerge as strategic opportunities, while others are seen as broader organizational challenges.
Formal action taking processes don’t guarantee action: Managers tend to engage in informal action planning, citing insights, effort, and tools as key barriers. There’s a clear opportunity to invest in high-value resources that are inconsistently provided by organizations.

Let’s now dive deeper into each of these critical areas.

Qualities of critical data and insights

When we think about what types of data and insights managers are accessing and consuming, it can be helpful to think about 1) what activities they are hoping to use it for and 2) what characteristics make the data actionable. In our survey, we asked managers to select the top activities for which they seek the right data and insights.

The top three activities surfaced by our sample were all operational-based activities – these fundamental activities that are often expected of managers to execute. What we learn from this is that managers are seeking data to bolster their ability to be an effective manager, driving performance and productivity on their team. We also saw that relational activities ranked lower on the list, such as advocating for their team and providing recognition. This suggests that while these are still important managerial behaviors, managers don’t rely as heavily on data to perform them.

We also asked managers to select the top characteristics that make data and insights actionable.

As shown in the table, relevance was the top characteristic (by almost +10 percentage points) that makes data and insights feel actionable to managers. Without this connection point, managers may not understand what is expected of them in terms of acting on irrelevant pieces of information. Tied for second were two organizational purpose-based characteristics, indicating that managers are also looking for the data and insights to be contextualized in the broader goals, values, and priorities of the organization. This helps provide the ‘why’ behind acting on these data and insights and how they ladder up to wider initiatives.

Survey themes vary in perceived actionability

There are various topics that may be asked on your company’s surveys (e.g., growth, recognition, culture) so we sought to understand to what extent managers feel it is easy to make meaningful improvements on these topics and whether they are empowered to act on them. We presented managers with a list of survey topics and asked them to rate 1) how easy the topic was to impact and 2) how much control they felt they had over that topic. Below you can see these topics presented with their average ‘ease’ and ‘control’ scores.

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

Manager Low-Hanging Fruit: Considered easier to improve and well within the control of the manager can help get quick wins and keep momentum.
Strategic Challenges: Still within the control of the manager but considered more difficult to move the needle on, might challenge momentum.
Collective Efforts: Sits in the middle of ease and control. These topics require coordination and often rely on more business-level leadership.
Organizational Undertakings: Themes considered outside of the control of the manager and hard to improve; often considered more organization-wide initiatives.

When reviewing these buckets with the earlier data on critical activities, we noticed a strong overlap between the Strategic Challenges bucket and the top activities managers reported needing the right data and insights for (i.e., prioritization, collaboration/performance). In other words, there is a sweet spot of activities that are critical to the manager but not necessarily the easiest to make impactful and sustained progress on, where organizations can consider providing an additional layer of support or data.

Formal action taking processes don’t guarantee action

We sought to better understand the current manager experience from receiving data, to action taking, to seeing improvements by asking managers how they felt about their organizational practices around action taking, how many action taking behaviors they engaged in in the last 6 months, and their top barriers and resources in this process.

What we found was that even though managers felt favorably about their organization’s action taking practices, the fact that they have formal processes doesn’t guarantee action. Most of our managers reporting struggling to turn insights into action.

Under half of the managers sampled for this study reported engaging in any behaviors associated with action taking after receiving survey results and insights. In addition to the numbers above, we also saw that:

only 42% of managers reported recognizing their team for progress made
only 38% of managers reported sharing key survey results and insights with their team
only 25% of managers reported tying action plans to broader business objectives
and only 21% of managers reported conducting pulse surveys to assess progress

What this tells us is that even though managers have a formal action taking process at their organization, they likely do not feel as though they have the right resources or time to engage in action taking behaviors. To dive deeper into this, we asked managers what barriers they felt they faced when trying to act on survey results and insights.

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

Improving the relevance of insights: Managers feel the themes they are asked to act on are not within their control. We saw earlier that there are varying levels of controllable topics, and it can feel challenging to engage in action taking when topics feel outside of this scope. Organizations should focus on more targeted insights that address topics that managers feel empowered to act upon. 
Increasing confidence: Managers can feel overwhelmed with trying to keep momentum going on action taking between survey signals and when they don’t see how others are staying engaged, it can impact their motivation to keep action taking top of mind. Organizations should focus on increasing managers confidence in the action taking experience by offering cross-team support and collaboration opportunities to make it a team- and organization-wide investment.
Activating tools: Managers are seeking additional tools to help them through the action-taking process. While there may be a formal process, it may not be aligned with formal tools that support managers’ efforts. Organizations should focus on increasing investment in centralizing tools for tracking, seeking feedback, and staying on top of action taking behaviors.

When thinking about reducing these barriers that managers are facing when approaching action taking, it’s also important to consider what resources they value the most to help them engage in action taking. It’s also important to consider what resources they may wish they had to further bolster their experience. We asked managers to name the resources they are currently receiving and the resources that they value (regardless of whether they currently receive them).

What we saw was that, in general, managers are receiving the resources that they value the most, including templates, action recommendations, training in how to take action, and examples of action taking. The opportunity where organizations may consider further exploring lies in the region of resources to invest in. These are high value resources that are less frequently provided by organizations (e.g., gen AI tools, targeted insights, ways to collaborate in the action planning process). We see similarities in these investment opportunities to the top barriers 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 our managers that are trying to act on survey results and insights. It helps us clarify what resources to focus on and what barriers we can try to reduce.

Watch how we’ve presented some of these findings in our recent Ask the Experts series on Enabling Managers and Identifying Insights from Reports (Viva Glint: Ask the Experts – Microsoft Adoption) and stay tuned for future research drops from the Viva People Science team!

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