How Can Employee Experience Leaders Move the Scores From Their Engagement Survey?

Employee experience leaders own the survey process and outcomes, but developing the manager capabilities needed to improve those outcomes have usually sat with someone else. According to Perceptyx's 2026 State of Employee Listening research, 59% of employees say action plans get built after a survey, yet only 51% say anything improved. Closing this gap will take more than a good action plan. Managers need the skills to turn feedback into meaningful change. Develop helps employee experience leaders bridge that gap with ready-to-deploy learning experiences, mapped to the People Insights Model and targeted to the manager capabilities identified as focus areas through survey feedback. A Capability Score for every manager shows learning progress within weeks, so employee experience leaders can report results before the next survey opens.

Andrew Sears

October 14, 2026

You run the survey, identify the focus areas, and share the results. Managers receive their action plans and get to work. Whether the scores move on the next survey depends on something the employee experience team have traditionally had limited visibility into: whether each manager has the skills the plan calls for. A plan to improve career conversations assumes the manager knows how to hold one. A plan to rebuild trust during a reorganization assumes the manager knows how to lead a team through change. Knowing what to fix and knowing how to fix it are two different things. Even the best action plans stall out if people don't have the skills to execute it.

Develop closes that gap from inside the Perceptyx platform. Employee experience leaders can now assign focused, AI-guided development sessions to the managers whose teams need it, informed by the areas of focus identified through their teams’ survey results. They can also track how well managers understand and can apply what they’ve learned, giving them an earlier measure of capability development without waiting for the next listening cycle.

Why Do Low Engagement Scores Repeat Between Surveys?

Scores won't improve if managers get the data but lack the skills to act on it. Perceptyx's 2026 State of Employee Listening research, based on interviews with more than 750 senior HR decision-makers at organizations with 1,000 or more employees across the U.S. and Europe, tracks where the follow-through drops off:

71% of employees say their organization shares survey results
59% say action plans are created
51% say improvements resulted from their feedback

That leaves a 20-point gap between sharing results and employees seeing change. The same research shows that employees who see no change after a listening event are 2.5 times as likely to disagree that senior leaders' actions align with organizational values. Even organizations that narrow their focus to a few high-priority issues and assign clear owners still depend on whether those owners have the skills to follow through. When the next survey arrives, the same items often come back low.

Structured action planning more than doubles the share of organizations that see engagement improve: 59% of organizations with action plans report engagement gains, compared with 28% of organizations without. Manager skill is one of the barriers that remain: 22% of organizations in the study named manager talent and skills as an obstacle to acting on feedback.

Why Do Employee Experience Teams Struggle to Close Manager Skill Gaps?

Most employee experience teams have treated listening, action, and development as three separate jobs owned by three separate groups. The employee experience team runs the survey and delivers the insight. Managers own the action plans. Learning and development owns the training catalog. Each group does good work, but the employee experience leader who is accountable for the score has little say over whether managers receive the development their plans require. When listening happens only once a year, the gap between spotting a skill need and addressing it stretches even wider.

Three obstacles keep manager development out of the employee experience leader's reach:

No connection between survey results and development content. A low score on Growth & Development does not automatically point a manager to development content on career conversations. Someone has to make that match by hand, team by team.
Development sits outside the listening platform. Getting a course to managers usually means opening a request with L&D, sourcing content, and waiting for it to be loaded into a separate system.
The wait feels normal. Many employee experience leaders have accepted that they won't know whether their managers improved until the next survey closes, often ten months or more after the action plans were written.

What is Develop?

Develop helps employee experience leaders fix the problems employees raise in surveys by giving managers the skills to act on that feedback. It is built for employee experience leaders, and it appears as a Develop tab in the Perceptyx platform navigation, next to Act.

Every Develop customer receives ready-to-launch courses, designed by Perceptyx I/O psychologists and mapped to themes from the People Insights Model. Courses cover the People Insights Model EX factors, and draw on Perceptyx's most popular workshops:

Employee Engagement
DEI&B
Growth & Development
Future Vision
Manager Relationship
Change & Innovation
Performance Enablement
Teamwork & Collaboration
Recognition & Reward
Workplace Well-Being
Turning Employee Feedback Into Action
AI Adoption

Develop is a focused catalog of courses built to match the items a Perceptyx survey measures, which sets it apart from a general LMS content library. Employee experience teams don't need to source content or file an LMS ticket to get a course to managers. Most of what EX leaders need is already covered by the customizable, ready-to-go courses, each of which can be adapted as an organization’s needs evolve. For teams that want to go further and build their own courses from scratch, Develop offers that too, and your Perceptyx team can walk you through what that looks like.

How does Develop work?

Develop deploys from the survey you already run, in three steps:

Survey design. Your Perceptyx consultant maps your survey items to the People Insights Model.
Results. Driver analysis identifies which aspects of the employee experience have the greatest influence on engagement, highlighting priority areas for improvement.
Deploy. The matching courses go to the managers whose teams need them.

During setup, Perceptyx's Workforce Transformation Consulting (WTC) team tailors each course to your organization. WTC adds your own context materials, adjusts course length, and changes the order and number of modules so each course reflects your priorities and your language.

After setup, your team can edit the courses directly by adding, removing, or reordering modules, adjusting learning objectives, and uploading more material. If you would rather have WTC make those changes, additional WTC hours are available.

Because the courses are ready on day one, EX leaders can start deploying them as soon as survey results are in.

What Does a Develop Course Include for Managers?

Each course is a one-on-one conversation between the manager and an AI agent, completed in a single session inside the Perceptyx platform. The agent guides each manager through the material by asking questions, adjusts to what they already know, moves faster through material they've mastered, and slows down where they need more support. Two managers in the same course will have two different experiences.

There are no quizzes, and managers can't click through to the end. The agent evaluates each answer as the conversation runs, and the session progresses only after the manager has shown they understand the material and can apply it.

Consider a manager whose team survey results identify career growth as a key driver of engagement and a priority for improvement. The action plan recommends regular development conversations. Through Develop, that manager completes the Growth & Development course, tailored with the organization's own career framework, and practices how to open and structure those conversations with the AI agent. After the session, Activate delivers nudges in the flow of work that prompt the manager to apply what they learned with their team. Perceptyx research shows 96% of people who receive nudges report a noticeable change in the behaviors those nudges reinforce.

How Can Employee Experience Leaders Show Impact Before the Next Survey?

Develop gives employee experience leaders a Capability Score for every manager, providing insight into the skills and behaviors the survey flagged. Scores arrive within weeks of deployment, and each one is backed by evidence of what the manager demonstrated in the conversation. Employee experience leaders can view results for individual managers or for whole cohorts to see which groups are ready and which still need development.

Employee experience leaders can go into the next leadership review with a result in hand: which managers have built the capability their plans require, and where to direct additional support, months before survey results would show it. When the next listening event comes around, they can also connect learning comprehension back to survey results to demonstrate how it translates into improvement in the employee experience as well.

At a global HR technology company, confidence in the future emerged as a key driver of engagement. Develop was used to strengthen managers’ understanding of the company’s new strategy, supported by ongoing nudges through Activate. On the following survey, individuals who showed high comprehension of the company’s vision showed a 16-point improvement in confidence in the future compared to a 24-point decline for those with lower comprehension. In addition, those with higher comprehension of the vision showed a 14-point higher Engagement score compared to those with lower comprehension on the next survey. These results reflect associations and do not come from a controlled trial. Across the Perceptyx platform, customers using nudges see up to a 12-point engagement score lift and a 20% improvement in targeted behaviors within six months.

How Do Perceptyx Customers Get Develop?

Develop, part of the People Activation System, is available to any Perceptyx customer as an add-on to their existing employee listening program. Once onboarded, the Develop tab appears in the platform, and the Workforce Transformation Consulting team works with your team to tailor the courses before managers receive them. Organizations already using Activate gain the missing step between the action plan and the nudge: manager capability.

Organizations new to Perceptyx can bring listening, action planning, manager development, and nudges together in the People Activation System from the start.

See where your managers' follow-through is breaking down in the 2026 State of Employee Listening report, or talk to a Perceptyx expert to see Develop running against your own survey results.