Key Highlights
- Frontline managers’ Trust Index™ scores align most closely with individual contributors, making them the most accurate proxy for how work feels on the ground.
- Nearly three-quarters of those manager’s time is spent on tasks unrelated to managing people, which means the window for acting on survey data is small.
- The employees whose experience is inconsistent rather than negative represent the fastest path to measurable culture improvement, and frontline managers are best positioned to reach them.
Recent McKinsey Global Survey uncovered something most managers already know to be true: nearly three‑quarters of a people leader’s time is swallowed by admin, reporting, and BAU … not the actual work of leading people.
In our business that trade‑off has a specific and genuine cost because it leaves very little time or headspace to interpret employee survey results and turn them into meaningful action.
Great Place To Work®’s 2025 Australia dataset of 158,749 employees across companies of different sizes and industries showed that the tightest alignment in Trust Index™ scores sits between individual contributors and frontline managers. These two groups see the workplace in very similar terms. The gap widens at each step up the hierarchy, we see mid-level managers report higher scores, and executives higher again.
When something shifts at that level, like a policy that lands badly, a restructure that isn’t clearly explained, or a new system nobody has been trained for, the organization feels it almost immediately. This is where leadership intent meets (or misses) lived reality.
This very common structure can create a tricky situation when the leaders with the clearest line of sight to how work feels day to day are often the last to receive structured feedback about it. They’re close enough to sense what’s going on but are not always equipped to know exactly where to intervene.
Four ways to close the gap between survey data and action
Managers need a clean answer to three questions: what moved, what didn’t, and where should I focus? The Trust Index™ survey covers 60 statements across five dimensions, plus two open-ended questions. Sixty statements is comprehensive and deliberate, that’s the point of the methodology. It’s also more than any single manager should be expected to act on at once.
1. Give them their team’s results, with any noisy data stripped out
Across Australia’s Best Workplaces™, the strongest HR leaders aren’t the ones who share the most data with managers. They’re the ones who are most disciplined about what they don’t share. Deep statistical cuts, broad benchmarking, sensitive demographic segmentation can all stay with the HR leadership team.
The reason isn’t secrecy but focus. A frontline manager running a team of 12 doesn’t need the organization-wide breakdown by tenure band cross-referenced with engagement quintiles. They need to know what moved, what didn’t, and where to start.
The work of translating survey results into something a manager will be able to use, and more importantly, something that will help them guide their team, is an editorial act closer to journalism than analytics.
In my years of experience I’ve personally seen so many organizations either skip this step entirely (here’s your dashboard, good luck!) or overcorrect by holding everything at the centre. But the organizations that improve fastest do something in between, they curate.
The most effective organizations I see build manager-ready reporting that surfaces the handful of data points a leader can influence directly. This is also where the concept of the movable middle becomes particularly useful. In any team, there’s typically a group of employees whose experience is inconsistent. They’re not disengaged, but they’re not consistently positive either. They’ve had good experiences alongside frustrating ones.
Because the positive foundation already exists, this group represents the most realistic path to measurable improvement. A frontline manager with visibility into where their team’s moveable middle sits can focus on what’s already working and make the experience consistent. Team by team, conversation by conversation.
2. A short list of behaviorally actionable statements
In the Great Place To Work Trust Index™ survey, employees respond to 60 different statements about their experience at work. No manager can (or should) try to tackle all 60 at once. In practice, they need a short list of three to five statements to focus on at any given time.
The obvious move is to go straight to the lowest scores, but that’s often a trap. The lowest‑scoring items are frequently structural issues like pay, benefits, or headcount which are all important, but usually outside a frontline manager’s control. Asking them to fix pay equity is like asking a lifeguard to fix the tide.
Where managers can have real impact is on the statements tied to observable, daily behaviors: how recognition is given, how decisions are communicated, whether people feel genuinely heard. That’s the level where culture feels different, week to week.
At Moose Toys, for example, a People Manager Network (PMN) identifies a focused set of high-impact statements and builds manager capability around those specific levers. Rather than asking people leaders to improve everything, they’re equipped to work on a few behaviors that shift everyday experience.
ALSO READ: How To Give Your Middle Managers The Data They Need To Succeed
3. The confidence to explain the why
Data without a story attached to it tends not to do much to help. Managers are always able to read what the results say, but many struggle when it comes to knowing what to do about them, and it’s not because the managers don’t care. It’s because insight without interpretation creates hesitation.
When you’re left alone with a dashboard and no guide for what matters most, good intentions tend to diffuse into soft plans to work on communication or do more check-ins.
The most effective organizations address this by connecting survey insights to their strategic people priorities. If psychological safety is the year’s focus, the narrative links specific scores to specific behaviors that build (or erode) it. If hybrid work is creating friction, the narrative contextualizes what the data is reflecting and suggests a concrete first step.
The point is translation, turning abstract patterns into something a manager can own, explain to their team, and act on before the end of the month.
4. Qualitative themes, already sense-checked
Open-ended survey comments are where the texture lives. They tell managers why the numbers look the way they do and, if handled carelessly, offer a fast track to defensiveness.
Sharing raw verbatim comments with managers is a bit like handing someone an unedited transcript of a meeting about them and telling them to learn from it on the spot. Some of it will be useful, some is likely to be unfair. And the unfair parts will drown out the useful ones, because that’s how human brains work.
Effective organizations synthesize feedback into recurring themes and sense-check those themes before they reach managers. This protects psychological safety, reduces defensiveness, and makes feedback easier to absorb and act on. It also adds colour to the quantitative picture, where numbers tell you where the gaps are, themed comments can tell you what’s driving them.
Flight Centre positions engagement survey insights as a minimum business standard so that results flow into town halls, monthly updates, and regular one-on-ones, turning data into ongoing dialogue rather than a once-a-year event.
Specsavers supports its partners through a self-audit gap analysis and practical toolkits, enabling store leaders to identify local gaps and introduce initiatives they can control directly. In both cases, the insight is deliberately shaped to support conversation not to overwhelm the person receiving it.
ALSO READ: How Employee Surveys Can Help Pivot the ‘Moveable Middle’ in Your Organization
Why post-survey action stalls and what the best workplaces do differently
If the goal is culture improvement and it should be, the business case is well-established at this point), leaving people managers alone with a dashboard and good intentions isn’t fair and it doesn’t work. The distance between getting results and knowing what to do about them is where most post-survey momentum can be lost.
High-trust organizations invest in that gap. They invest in interpretation, so managers don’t have to become amateur data analysts. They invest in narrative, so the why is as clear as the what. And they invest in capability, so managers walk into their next team conversation knowing what to say, what to listen for, and what to commit to.
When that happens, post-survey work stops being a compliance exercise and starts being visible follow-through, the kind employees can feel in the way work gets done, every day.
How Great Place To Work® can help
Great Place To Work® supports organizations at every stage of making survey results manager-ready:
- Manager communiqués that translate survey insights into clear expectations and practical next steps, particularly for leaders enabled with Manager Access.
- Results Interpretation Workshops that build confidence in reading results, prioritizing what matters, and leading high-quality team conversations that turn feedback into focused action plans.
- Deeper thematic analysis and leading practices so organizations can move from “what we heard” to “what we’re changing,” with clear owner-led actions at enterprise and team level.
If your managers are spending more time trying to understand their survey data than acting on it, that’s a solvable problem. Get in touch
