Your Engagement Score Isn’t Lying — It’s Just Not Telling You the Real Truth

You’ve seen the number.

A 68. Or maybe a 72.

Your team’s “engagement” score is in. Now what?

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: engagement scores are great at measuring how people feel, but terrible at showing how teams are actually performing.

Most companies run engagement surveys with good intentions.

They want a sense of morale. A read on sentiment. A benchmark to compare to last year.

But here’s the strategic flaw: engagement data is emotional, subjective, and backward-looking. It’s a lagging indicator — not a performance diagnostic.

By the time a dip in engagement shows up, the real problems have already taken root:

• Team alignment has broken down

• Manager effectiveness is slipping

• Psychological safety has quietly eroded

• Goals have become unclear or irrelevant

And yet, we continue to bet on this approach. We measure how people feel about work and hope it correlates with how well work is actually getting done. That’s a risky assumption.

Even when scores are “high,” we’re often left asking:

So… what now?

That’s because traditional engagement surveys rarely tell you:

• Which teams are at risk

• Where leadership breakdowns are happening

• What actions will actually move the needle

They produce sentiment, not strategy.

The real opportunity is to stop treating engagement as a goal and start treating it as a result — the outcome of something deeper: clarity, leadership, trust, accountability.

To get there, we need to measure how culture is functioning as a system — not just how people feel about it.

Ask instead:

• Are our teams aligned on goals, roles, and expectations?

• Do managers reinforce values and drive accountability?

• Is there space for challenge, learning, and feedback?

These aren’t emotional inputs — they’re operational ones. They’re behaviors. They’re observable. And they’re leading indicators of whether performance is accelerating or stalling.

→ This is the gap SKOR fills.

We go beyond engagement to measure how teams are led — and how that leadership is experienced — with structured questions for both managers and their team members.

The result? Actionable insight, not opinion.

Because performance isn't a mood — it’s a system.

And systems, when measured well, can be improved.

🔵 Want to see how your leadership is shaping performance. Take the SKOR Preview.