When Engagement Scores Fail: Why Your Culture Dashboards Are Lying to You

Metrics That Matter – Part 1

Leaders keep telling me some version of the same story:

We have so much data about our people.
We have engagement scores, pulse surveys, performance ratings, turnover stats…
So why does it still feel like we’re flying blind?

And they aren’t wrong.

Most “culture dashboards” look impressive, but when it’s time to make real decisions about people, trust, and performance, they feel thin. You can see the numbers, but you still can’t answer the question that actually matters:

Is our culture helping our people and our business thrive, or is it getting in the way?

In our Metrics That Matter series on the Collaborative Culture podcast, Monica and I dug into why that disconnect is so common and what it will take to change it.

This first post is about something a lot of organizations don’t want to admit:

Your culture metrics probably aren’t measuring culture.

And that’s exactly why you’re stuck.

The Myth of “More Data”

Over the past decade, we’ve seen an explosion of tools and platforms promising to help you “measure engagement” and “manage culture with data.”

You may already be tracking:

• Employee engagement scores
• eNPS (employee Net Promoter Score)
• Turnover by department
• Performance ratings and calibration
• Time-to-fill, time-to-productivity
• Training hours, billable hours, utilization

On paper, it looks like a lot. In practice, most of that data was designed for something else:

• Compliance – documenting that you followed the rules
• Transactions – tracking hires, terminations, pay changes
• Control – making sure raises, bonuses, and promotions stay within budget

Culture, the learned and shared values, beliefs, and behaviors in your organization, is an afterthought, if it’s considered at all.

So we end up relabeling compliance and activity data as “culture metrics” and then feel confused when none of it predicts trust, belonging, or performance very well.

Engagement Scores: Helpful, Yes. Sufficient, Absolutely Not.

Let’s talk about the sacred cow: engagement scores.

I’m not anti–engagement survey. They can surface useful patterns and trends, but there are a few hard truths we have to name:

1.  Engagement is usually a lagging indicator.
   By the time people are disengaged enough to tell you the truth on a survey, they’re often already halfway out the door.
2.  The questions are full of assumptions.
   “I would recommend this company as a great place to work” sounds simple, but:
•  Recommend it to whom? Your best friend? A stranger?
•  Recommend what? The company overall? Your team? Your manager?

1.  Intent to stay doesn’t always predict actually staying.
   People say what feels safe in the moment. When the right opportunity appears, behavior can change very quickly.
2.  Scores can be gamed.
   When engagement targets are tied to leadership performance or incentives, leaders learn, consciously or not, how to manage perception instead of reality.

So yes, engagement scores can tell you something, but if they’re your primary culture metric, you’re building your strategy on a very wobbly foundation.

Pretty Dashboards, Messy Reality

Here’s what I see over and over again:

• A gorgeous dashboard with green/yellow/red engagement heatmaps
• Clean, color-coded performance distributions
• Turnover broken out by quarter, department, location

And at the same time:

• Surprise exits from high performers
• “Quiet quitting” and burnout stories that don’t match the cheerful survey results
• Teams doing great on paper but struggling with trust, conflict, or psychological safety
• Leaders privately saying, “I don’t believe these numbers, but I don’t know what else to use.”

When your metrics and your lived experience don’t match, it’s not a sign that you’re bad at reading the data.

It’s a sign that: You’re asking your data to do a job it was never designed to do.

Activity ≠ Culture

A big theme in our Metrics That Matter conversations was the difference between activity and culture.

Most of what organizations track falls into the “activity” bucket:

• How many people attended the training
• How many 1:1s managers logged in the system
• How many times values were mentioned in communications
• How many DEI events or town halls you held

But culture isn’t a count of activities. Culture is:

• How decisions actually get made when there’s a trade-off
• Who gets promoted and protected
• What behavior gets rewarded, tolerated, or quietly punished
• What people really believe about “what it takes to succeed here”

Those things rarely show up directly in your standard HR metrics. And when they do, it’s usually by accident, not design.

That’s why so many leaders feel like they’re “doing all the right things,” more surveys, more initiatives, more dashboards, and still not getting traction.

The Hidden Problem: We’ve Confused Evidence with Insight

Part of the challenge is psychological. Numbers give us a sense of security.

• If there’s a chart, it feels real.
• If there’s a percentage, it feels precise.
• If we can compare ourselves to a benchmark, it feels objective.

But evidence is not the same as insight.

You can have an ocean of evidence (scores, ratings, counts) and still have no real understanding of:

• Why people are staying
• Why innovation has stalled
• Why frontline teams don’t trust senior leadership
• Why a new initiative isn’t taking off, despite “high engagement”

Insight lives in the patterns, contradictions, and context behind the numbers, and most culture dashboards aren’t built to surface that. They’re built to summarize and soothe.

What Leaders Actually Need from Culture Metrics

When I work with companies on culture, we don’t start by adding more metrics.

We start by asking:

• What decisions are you trying to make?
• What do you need to understand about your people and your culture to make those decisions well?
• What would you need to see, in behavior, in relationships, in outcomes, to believe that your culture is working?

From there, we design metrics that matter, which usually look very different from a standard engagement dashboard.

Metrics that matter are:

• Actionable – they point clearly to what needs to change
• Aligned – they connect to your purpose, values, and strategy
• Balanced – they include both leading and lagging indicators
• Grounded in reality – they’re informed by qualitative insight, not just system data
• Harder to game – because they look at behavior and coherence, not just sentiment

In Part 2 and Part 3 of this series, we’ll get more concrete about what those metrics look like and how to design them.

But first, we have to be honest:

If your current metrics were truly working, you wouldn’t feel this constant disconnect.

How to Tell if Your Culture Metrics are Failing You

Here are a few red flags we see all the time:

• Your engagement scores are “good,” but turnover is high or trust is low.
• Execs praise the numbers in public but privately admit they don’t believe them.
• Teams with very different leaders and dynamics end up with identical scores.
• Survey comments tell a much more painful story than the dashboard shows.
• Despite all the data, you’re still relying heavily on gut feel for major people decisions.

If you recognize yourself in any of those, you are not alone.

You need to recognize what your data is telling you, not about your people, but about your measurement approach.

You Don’t Need More Data. You Need Better Questions.

The point of this first post isn’t to bash engagement surveys or HR analytics. It’s to name something that most leaders already know in their gut:

The way we’re measuring “culture” today is not giving us the insight we need.

In the rest of this series, we’ll dig into:

• Part 2 – Rethinking HR Dashboards
  A better way to think about your data (beyond “more surveys”) and examples of culture metrics that actually move the needle.
• Part 3 – When Engagement Metrics Fail: What to Measure Instead
  How to work with the data you already have, spot where it’s misleading, and start turning your dashboards into tools you can trust.

If you can’t wait for the next posts, you can also listen to the full Metrics That Matter series on the Collaborative Culture podcast and grab the free “Making HR Data Truer” worksheet from our guest, Dr. Nicole Eisdorfer.

If this sounds like your world, you don’t have to untangle it alone

If you’re reading this thinking:

“This is uncomfortably familiar. We have all the data… and still no clear story.”

That’s exactly where my work begins.

As a cultural anthropologist and founder of Culture Grove, I help growth-stage leaders:

• Audit their current people and culture metrics
• Separate signal from noise
• Design a culture measurement approach that actually reflects how work gets done
• And then use those insights to build cultures where people and performance thrive

If you’re ready to move beyond pretty dashboards to metrics that actually matter, I’d love to talk.

👉 Next step: Reach out to schedule a conversation about your current culture metrics and where they’re letting you down.

We’ll look at what you’re tracking today, what decisions you’re trying to make, and what it would take to build a measurement approach that finally matches the culture you say you want to cultivate.