UK 
United States
The absence of feedback is itself a form of feedback.
What do you do when your engagement survey results come with responses from barely over a third of your team?
The short answer: try to understand why the other two-thirds decided their voice wasn't worth 15 minutes, and what it’d take to change their mind.
I didn’t even publish the results
I’d been in the company for just two months when the results of our latest engagement survey came in. It was a standard questionnaire: employees were asked about things like their experience at work, confidence in leadership, communication, and whether they felt supported by their teams.
I opened the report expecting to see the usual mix of insights and complaints. But the first thing that caught my eye was an abysmal response rate – 38%.
The established action plan was to present the findings to the leadership, and then to the whole team. Conventional HR wisdom says that transparency builds trust: employees invest time in completing a survey, so they deserve to see the numbers.
Many organisations launch a new survey before they've had the chance to act on the results of the previous one. From an employee's perspective, it feels like answering the same questions time after time with no visible change
I agree, assuming the data is solid. A 38% response rate doesn’t give you a reliable picture of the organisation. It tells you how a group of people who chose to participate feel, but it doesn’t tell you whether their experience represents the wider workforce. The missing 62% could have completely changed the picture.
So, I didn’t show anyone the results, because I didn’t want us to treat incomplete data as a fact. Because once data appears in a dashboard, leaders begin asking why one department scored lower than another, and HR teams start prioritising initiatives around the lowest-rated questions. Had we viewed the results as informative, we would’ve drawn wrong conclusions and likely ended up solving problems most employees didn’t even have.
So instead, HR should ask themselves, "Why did so many people decide not to respond?".
What the silence tells us
The conclusion that people don't care isn’t always true. They usually have better reasons for staying silent.
The first possibility is a lack of trust in anonymity. Even if a survey is technically anonymous, employees don't always believe it. It’s especially relevant for smaller teams. If there are only five people in your department, you may worry that a particularly critical comment could be traced back to you. If that’s the reason, there’s no easy fix. Trust is built over time through actions and consistency.
The second – and, I suspect, more important – reason is that people didn't believe their feedback would lead to change. Gallup (2023) has found that only 8% of employees strongly agree their organisation acts on survey results. Your team remembers whether anything meaningful happened afterwards. If previous surveys resulted in presentations and colourful dashboards but little improvement to their day-to-day work, people would naturally question whether spending another 15 minutes on a questionnaire was worth their time. Especially given that engagement surveys should measure deep, structural aspects of organisational life that can’t be changed in a few weeks – culture, leadership, communication, trust. Many organisations launch a new survey before they've had the chance to act on the results of the previous one. From an employee's perspective, it feels like answering the same questions time after time with no visible change.
A 38% response rate doesn’t give you a reliable picture of the organisation. It tells you how a group of people who chose to participate feel, but it doesn’t tell you whether their experience represents the wider workforce
There’s a third possibility. Silence doesn't necessarily mean people have stopped giving feedback. Maybe they just choose different channels. Some speak openly with their managers; others raise concerns during all-hands meetings, in Slack discussions, or exit interviews. It’s not always clear to them why they should repeat themselves in a questionnaire.
Finally, there are practical reasons why people don't respond. They can be overwhelmed with work, for instance. Some have recently joined the company and don't yet feel qualified to evaluate it. And only a small proportion of the team is truly indifferent.
