We need to talk about engagement scores.
Somewhere in your organisation right now, there is a dashboard flashing green, amber or red, crying out for attention.
Maybe even a heatmap of these scores across teams.
Whatever that number is, chances are someone will be handed the job of interpreting it and making a plan to improve it.
I have been that someone. And I work with a lot of people cough HR cough who are also that someone.
There’s one problem with that.
An engagement score on its own can tell you where you are, but won’t tell you anything about why.
Engagement is a scoreboard. It’s useful, but a scoreboard only tells you how the game is going, not what you need to do at training.
In terms of performance measurement, it’s a lag indicator. It’s the output of your culture, not the input.
To move it, you have to go upstream to the behaviours that actually produce it. Shift those, and then you’ll see the score change.
A few years ago I stopped making it all about the score and started looking for gaps.
Three of them, specifically.
Aspiration. The distance between where the team is and the standard it set itself. I talk about this as the distance between the values on the wall and the behaviours down the hall. A big gap here isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It might just tell a story that your team has high ambition. It also may be a behaviour you’ve only just started to change. Either way, you know where to look.
Perception. Your read against your team’s. This one can sting. It’s also one we don’t talk about enough. When a leader scores a behaviour higher than the team does, and it happens a lot, that difference is the gap many leaders never see, and it is the one that costs trust.
Tasha Eurich wrote a helpful piece on this that found most people think they are self-aware, but by her estimate only 10 to 15% actually are.
Spread. How much the team agrees with itself. An average of 7 can be a team of sevens or a team of tens and fours. Those are two completely different experiences for people on the team, and they need two very different conversations.
A gap is still a number. And yes, still technically a score (semantics). The difference is where it points. An engagement score points at everything at once. A gap points at one behaviour, and a behaviour is something a team can actually talk about. That’s what makes it useful.
Take any behaviour your team has agreed to, and you can ask all three questions about it. How far are we from what we said? Do I see it the way they see it? Are we all roughly in the same place, or are a few people carrying it?
Take team dissent as an example. Can we disagree in the room, not after it? The standard you set is 8. You would put the team at 7. Ask the team, and they average 5, with answers anywhere from 2 to 9. That is an aspiration gap of 3, a perception gap of 2, and a spread that says some people feel safe to disagree and some don’t. One behaviour, but three very different conversations.
My research pointed to this also. Nine out of ten people leaders believe culture is the outcome of lots of little decisions made over time. Little decisions don’t show up in one big number. They show up in small gaps that often go unnoticed.
Culture Offsite now measures all three gaps on your team, alongside a video-led guide to your next team offsite. Take a look or book a free demo.
One thing to try the next time you’re the ‘someone’ handed the number and told to fix it.
Pick one behaviour your team agreed to. Ask them where they’d place it, before you tell them where you would.
Engagement is the last domino to fall. A gap is one you can still reach now.