Acting on the Results

The most common failure in workplace wellbeing is not measuring badly. It is measuring, and then doing nothing visible.

Why it is worse than not asking

Asking creates an expectation. People invest effort and reveal something.

Silence answers the question. It says either that nothing will change or that nobody read it.

Response rates fall, permanently, and future measurement becomes useless.

It generalises. Cynicism about the survey extends to everything else the organisation says about wellbeing.

One unactioned survey costs more than the several years of goodwill it takes to rebuild.

The minimum credible response

Report back within weeks, not months. Speed signals attention.

Share the results, including the unflattering ones. Selective reporting is detected and confirms the suspicion.

Name what you will act on, specifically, with a date and an owner.

Name what you will not act on, and why. This is the part organisations skip and it is the part that buys credibility. A constraint honestly stated is respected; silence on an obvious issue is not.

Report progress against the commitments at a set interval, whether or not there is progress.

Choosing what to act on

One thing, done visibly, beats five things announced.

Pick something in the biggest problem area, not the easiest.

Pick something attributable. People need to be able to see that it happened because they said so.

Local action beats central programmes. Team-level responses to team-level findings are faster, more relevant, and more credible.

Give managers the results for their own team and the authority to act, with support. Most of the useful action is at that level.

The commitments to avoid

"We will continue to monitor."

"We will raise awareness of existing resources."

A working group, unless it has a deadline and a decision to make.

Anything that is a communication rather than a change.

A new benefit, offered in response to a workload finding.

Each of these is read correctly as a refusal, and stating a refusal plainly would cost less.

Recovering from a previous failure

Where a past survey produced nothing, the next one has to acknowledge it.

Say so directly. "We asked in 2023 and did not follow through. Here is what we are doing differently."

Do something before asking again. Act on the old results, late, and say that is what you are doing. This is the single most effective way to restore a response rate.

Reduce scope. Ask about less, and commit to acting on all of it.

Then hold to it, because a second failure is not recoverable within the tenure of the people involved.

The test

Before running any survey, ask the people commissioning it a single question.

If the results say the workload is unmanageable in three teams, what will we do?

If there is no answer, the survey should not run. Collecting the information without the intention or authority to act on it does harm, and postponing until the authority exists does none.

The report-back template

One page, sent within weeks, in the same form every time.

What we asked and how many responded.

What the results said, including the unflattering parts, with the segmentation.

What we are changing: two or three specific things, with owner and date.

What we are not changing, and why. Named honestly, including where the reason is cost or a constraint we cannot move.

What we are still deciding, and when we will say.

How to raise something in the meantime.

The fourth section is the one that buys credibility and the one organisations reliably omit. A clear refusal with a reason is respected; silence on an obvious finding is read as evasion.

The commitment that is checkable

The difference between a commitment and an intention is whether anyone could tell if it did not happen.

Not: "we will focus on workload."

But: "we will reduce recurring meeting hours in this team from nine to five per week by the end of March, measured from calendar data."

Named owner.

Named date.

Named measure, taken the same way before and after.

Reported on that date whether or not it was achieved.

Two checkable commitments beat ten aspirational ones, and the difference is immediately obvious to the people reading them.