One of the things I’ve noticed in my work with leaders and teams is how quickly staff survey results can become an exercise in producing action plans.  The results arrive, managers identify areas for improvement and attention turns to what needs to change.

Yet I’ve seen plans being developed before managers have properly explored the findings with the people who completed the survey. They can find themselves trying to solve problems they don’t fully understand, while employees have little involvement in deciding what might improve things.

It seems a strange place to end up when the whole exercise began by asking employees what they thought. It’s also an example of a wider issue I’ve been exploring recently: the difference between giving people opportunities to express their views and giving them meaningful influence over decisions affecting their work.

What the research tells us

A 2025 report, What is Happening to Participation at Work?, provides an interesting perspective on this. Drawing on the Skills and Employment Survey, the researchers found that in 2024, 74% of employees reported that management organised meetings where they could express their views about what was happening in the organisation. Yet only 28% felt they had significant influence over organisational decisions affecting their work.

The longer-term picture is perhaps more revealing. Consultative meetings have reached their highest recorded level, while employees’ perceived influence has fallen below where it stood in 1992.

The research also highlights why this matters. Almost 70% of employees reporting high organisational influence were completely or very satisfied with their jobs, compared with 38% of those reporting low or no influence. There were similar differences in motivation, with 45% of those reporting high influence strongly agreeing that they would work harder to help their organisation succeed, compared with just 20% of those reporting little or no influence. They were also more likely to have made suggestions for improving efficiency.

While these findings don’t prove cause and effect, they suggest that influence deserves attention, both for people’s experience of work and their willingness to contribute to organisational success.

What staff survey results don’t always tell us

Something I’ve noticed recently is how differently people can interpret the same question.

Take communication, for example. One person might be thinking about how well their manager keeps them informed, another about how organisational decisions are explained, while someone else might be thinking about whether their concerns are heard. They could give similar survey responses but be describing quite different experiences. A manager looking at the results might have an entirely different interpretation again.

This is one of the difficulties with moving too quickly from survey results to action plans. Without understanding what employees actually meant by their responses, managers risk developing solutions based on their own assumptions rather than the problems people are experiencing.

The people who completed the survey are often best placed to help make sense of the findings. Involving them in that conversation also creates an opportunity for their experience and ideas to influence what happens next, rather than treating their contribution as complete once they’ve submitted their responses.

Before you write the action plan

Perhaps the most useful first step when staff survey results arrive isn’t to start identifying actions, but to bring the findings back to the people whose experiences they reflect.

Ask what sits behind the results, what people believe would make a difference and whether there are things already working well that could be built upon. It’s a conversation that might reveal something quite different from what the scores initially suggested.

Of course, not every issue raised will be within a manager’s control, and some decisions won’t be open to influence. Being clear about those boundaries matters. So does explaining afterwards which suggestions have been taken forward, which haven’t and why.

This approach doesn’t remove the manager’s responsibility for deciding what to do. It means making those decisions with a better understanding of the problem and allowing employees to contribute to the response where there is genuine scope for them to do so.

A completed action plan may demonstrate that an organisation has responded to employee feedback. It doesn’t necessarily demonstrate that employees have had any influence over the response.

Gallie et al. (2025), What is Happening to Participation at Work?