How to Analyze Employee Survey Results and Present Them to Leadership

Analyzing employee survey results involves six steps: checking the quality of the data, building an overall picture of the organization, examining results by employee group, identifying priority action areas, analyzing open-ended comments and turning all the findings into a handful of key messages. The presentation to leadership should not contain all the data, but these key messages and the decisions they call for. In this article, we walk through each step and explain how to communicate the results to leadership, managers and employees.

1. Check the quality of the data

Before you start the analysis, make sure the data is reliable:

• Response rate: Look beyond the overall response rate at participation by department, location and white-/blue-collar status. Groups with low participation are underrepresented in the results. For details, see our article on employee survey response rates.
• Incomplete surveys: Decide on a clear rule for including participants who did not answer most of the survey, and apply it the same way every year.
• Careless responses: Check the share of participants who gave the same answer to every statement or finished the survey in an unrealistically short time. If that share is high, question the survey's length and wording.
• Reportable groups: Identify which groups fall below the minimum reporting threshold (5 people in most organizations) and merge them into their parent units.

2. Build the overall picture

The first question is simple: what does the picture look like across the organization?

• Engagement index: The share of favorable responses to the index statements, compared with the previous year.
• Category results: The distribution of favorable, neutral and unfavorable responses for each category. Looking only at the favorable share can be misleading: of two categories with the same favorable share, the one with more unfavorable responses is the more urgent problem.
• Highest and lowest statements: Beyond the categories, the 5 highest- and 5 lowest-scoring statements usually yield the most concrete findings.
• Change: The statements that rose and fell the most compared with the previous year. Changes in areas where action was taken the year before show whether those steps worked.
• Benchmarking: Where possible, a comparison with similar organizations measured using the same method. For details, see our article on employee engagement benchmarks.

We explained how the engagement index and categories are structured in our article what is an employee engagement survey.

3. Examine the breakdowns

The company average often collapses very different experiences into a single number. Examine results by breakdowns such as department, location, job level, white-/blue-collar status and tenure, and identify the groups that deviate most from the company average. The most useful tool for this is a heat map, with categories in the rows and groups in the columns. When interpreting differences of a few points between small groups, always take group size into account. You can find the details of the method in our article on segmentation in employee surveys.

4. Identify priority action areas

This is the most critical step of the analysis. The lowest-scoring category is not always the priority. Priority is determined by assessing two dimensions together:

• Score: The category's share of favorable responses.
• Impact: The strength of the category's relationship with the engagement index. The relationship between employees' scores for that category and their engagement scores is examined statistically.

For example, "pay and benefits" may receive the lowest score yet show a weak relationship with engagement, while "career and development" may have an average score but the strongest impact on engagement. In that case, the priority for increasing engagement is career and development. Limit the number of priority areas to 2–3 across the organization; prioritizing everything means prioritizing nothing.

5. Analyze open-ended comments

Closed questions show "what" is happening; open-ended comments show "why." Instead of reading comments one by one, code them by topic, count how many comments mention each topic and determine their tone. If the categories you identified as priority action areas also come up often in open-ended comments, the priority becomes clear. For each important topic, select a few representative quotes that do not reveal anyone's identity. If you have a large number of comments, you can speed up this process with AI; we explained how in our article on AI analysis of open-ended comments. You can find the details of the method in our article on open-ended employee survey questions.

6. Turn the findings into key messages

Hundreds of charts turn into a report no one knows what to do with. The final step of the analysis is to distill all the findings into 3–5 key messages. A good key message answers three questions:

1. What did we see? "The career and development category fell 6 points compared with last year and is the area with the greatest impact on engagement."
2. Why? "The most frequent topic in open-ended comments is unclear promotion criteria; the decline is steepest among employees with 3–5 years of tenure."
3. What should we do? "Clarify and communicate promotion criteria, and schedule career conversations for employees with 3–5 years of tenure."

How should you present to leadership?

The purpose of a senior leadership presentation is not to show data, but to drive decisions. A suggested flow:

A few principles that make the presentation stronger:

• Lead with the conclusion: Put the executive summary at the very start; the details come afterwards as support.
• Provide context: "64%" means nothing on its own. Compare it with last year, with groups within the organization and, if possible, with similar organizations.
• Few, simple charts: Each slide should convey a single message. The table of hundreds of statements belongs in the appendix.
• Do not soften negative results: Showing problems openly makes it easier to take the decisions needed to solve them.
• Talk about systems, not people: A presentation that blames individual managers or units triggers defensive reactions and undermines trust in future surveys.
• Ask for decisions: At the end of the presentation, spell out the concrete steps that need leadership approval and the resources required.

Team reports for managers

Alongside the company-wide results, every manager should receive a report for their team, provided it is large enough to report on:

• The team's results, compared with the company and department averages
• The team's three strongest and three weakest areas
• A short guide on how to read the report
• A suggested meeting flow for discussing the results with the team

When managers discuss the results with their teams and agree on one or two steps together, actions are put into practice much faster than when they are left to the organization as a whole. If you would like to give managers detailed feedback from their own teams, see our article on manager evaluation survey questions.

Sharing with employees

Employees want to see what their answers led to. The communication should include:

• The response rate and a thank-you for taking part
• Overall results, strengths and improvement areas
• A few examples in employees' own words
• The areas the organization will focus on, the steps it will take and the timeline

Openly acknowledging negative results, rather than hiding them, builds trust. Saying "We can see that we are not meeting your expectations on career development, and this year we will take the following steps" is far more effective than a general, upbeat summary.

Sample timeline

• Survey close + 2 weeks: Analysis and senior leadership presentation
• + 4 weeks: Team reports for managers and sharing overall results with employees
• + 6–8 weeks: Company- and team-level action plans finalized
• + 3–6 months: Pulse survey to track the impact of the actions

We covered the timing of pulse surveys in our article on how often to run employee surveys.

Common mistakes

• Reporting everything: No one reads a report that runs to hundreds of pages; the key messages get lost.
• Focusing only on the lowest scores: Resources are spent on low-impact areas, and engagement does not change.
• Starting a competition between groups: Ranking units and managers by their scores and announcing the results leads to pressure and dishonest answers in the next survey.
• Sharing results late: Results shared months later tell employees that the survey went nowhere.
• Failing to link analysis to action: Every key message should have an owner and a timeline. To turn results into lasting change, see our article on turning survey results into company culture.

Frequently asked questions