Key Highlights
- Employees led by highly engaged managers are 59% more likely to be engaged themselves.
- Mid and frontline managers are better at seeing patterns and problems that might be hard to see from above.
- Manager Access lets organizations cascade team-level Trust Index™ results to every people leader without exposing individual responses.
After 30 years, hearing from hundreds of millions of employees from companies all around the world, we want to let you in on one of our little secrets. Your middle managers aren’t just implementing your organizational culture, they are the culture. For every person who reports to them, every single working day.
Gallup’s research found that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units. One in two employees has left a role at some point specifically to escape a manager. On the flip side, employees led by highly engaged managers are 59% more likely to be engaged themselves.
Often crunched between the ever evolving expectations from the business, and trying to keep work human for their direct reports, middle and frontline managers are often also expected to build trust without a blueprint, close gaps they can’t measure, and improve scores they’ve never had explained.
What managers can do with their data that nobody else can
At Great Place To Work®, our data makes the cost of this visible. Dimension scores across the five pillars of workplace trust (credibility, respect, fairness, pride, and camaraderie) can vary more between teams within the same organization than between organizations in the same industry.
Detailed, benchmarked data about how their people experience the workplace, with team-level dimension breakdowns, open-ended comments, comparisons against the Best Workplaces™, can offer a clear plan to close the gaps and is particularly useful to middle managers. Some organizations do this well, but at many the data tends to stay with the HR leadership team. This is a structural glitch, it would be like withholding sales pipeline data from your sales managers and then wonder why conversion rates aren’t improving.
The reason team-level data matters so much in the hands of a middle manager is proximity. A HR lead looking at an organization-wide fairness score of 74% might see a strategic priority but a middle manager looking at their team’s fairness score of 68% sees a conversation they very much need to have.
What happens when managers have access to their Trust Index results
They can spot trust gaps that are invisible from above. Org-wide averages smooth out the variation between teams, so company with an overall respect score of 80% might have three teams at 90% and one at 58%. A senior leader looking at a low credibility score might use it to shape a broader communications strategy, and that’s still valuable work. But a middle manager looking at the same score for their own team can often connect it to something specific: a restructure that wasn’t explained clearly enough, a decision that landed without context. The fix might be a 20-minute team conversation rather than an organization-wide initiative.
They can build focused action plans. The most effective culture improvement doesn’t happen at the organization-wide level. It happens team by team, manager by manager, with two or three specific priorities that are tied to real feedback from real people. Great Place To Work’s culture consulting team works with managers to build exactly this kind of plan, turning a dimension score into a 90-day action agenda that’s specific, measurable, and small enough to execute.
They can close the loop with their people. When a manager says to their team, “Here’s what our Trust Index results showed. Here’s what I’m going to focus on. Here’s when I’ll update you” that act alone is one of the most powerful trust-building moments available in any workplace. It demonstrates credibility (I’m telling you the truth about our data), respect (I value your feedback enough to act on it), and fairness (everyone gets the same information). The conversation is the culture intervention.
ALSO READ: Your First Year with Great Place To Work: From Survey Design to Employer Branding
How to cascade data without compromising confidentiality
The most common objection to sharing Trust Index data with managers is confidentiality. The Trust Index survey is confidential but not anonymous. Great Place To Work sees individual responses, however your organization only receives aggregate data. Employees need to trust that their honest answers won’t be traced back to them. Any perception that a manager could identify who said what will likely seriously damage participation rates. Here’s how the Best Workplaces™ handle this:
Minimum reporting thresholds. The Emprising™ platform won’t display results for any group smaller than a set threshold (typically five respondents). Managers of very small teams see department-level data rather than team-level data. The privacy protection is structural which is built into the platform, not dependent on someone making a good judgement call.
Aggregate scores, not individual statements. A manager doesn’t need to know that Employee #47 rated “Management delivers on its promises” as a 2. They need to know that their team’s credibility dimension sits at 68% while the organizational average is 79%. That 11-point gap is the signal and the specific statements within the dimension tell them where to focus.
Demographic filters with guardrails. Our tech allows results to be filtered by tenure, department, location, and role level which helps managers understand whether, say, new hires are having a materially different experience from long-tenured team members. The same minimum threshold applies to every slice, so you can’t filter down to a group of two and reverse-engineer who said what.
Open-ended comments, de-identified. This is the part that makes most HR teams nervous, and it’s also the part that creates the most value. Stuart Elliot, Great Place To Work’s Consulting Director for the ASEAN region, says he learns more from reading 200 open-text responses than from six months of skip-level meetings. The comments tell managers why their scores look the way they do, surfaced without identifying information.
What the Best Workplaces do differently
Organizations that consistently appear on the Best Workplaces™ lists don’t gate-keep manager access to culture data as a special privilege, it’s just standard operating procedure.
They cascade data within 30 days of survey close. The longer results sit in an executive drawer, the less employees believe anything will change. Best Workplaces move fast. Results land, the senior leaders and / or HR review them, and within a month every people leader with a team above the reporting threshold has access to their dashboard where they can explore dimension scores, compare against benchmarks, and read their team’s feedback.
They pair data with coaching. Data without support is just a more detailed version of being left in the dark. Best Workplaces don’t dump dashboards on managers and walk away. They invest in coaching their people leaders through the process of reading results, identifying priorities, and having the follow-up conversation with their teams. Because sharing survey results requires the ability to be honest about the gaps without being defensive, specific about what you’ll change without over-promising, and willing to hear feedback that might be uncomfortable.
They measure change over time. The first survey is a baseline. The second survey shows whether your actions moved the needle. Organizations using Emprising™’s Trending feature track dimension-level shifts year over year, giving managers clear evidence that their work on culture is producing results and giving senior leaders the ROI data they need to keep investing.
Data doesn’t replace good leadership but good leaders without data are often flying blind, and your middle managers deserve better instruments.
Getting Started With Giving Managers The Data They Need To Succeed
Run the Trust Index. If you haven’t surveyed recently, start here. The survey covers 60 statements across five trust dimensions plus two open-ended questions, and produces benchmarked results you can act on immediately.
Turn on Manager Access. Emprising™ makes it straightforward to give every eligible manager access to their team’s results. Set your reporting threshold, define your demographic filters, and let the platform handle the privacy guardrails.
Build 90-day action plans. Pick two or three focus areas per team. Great Place To Work’s culture consulting team can help managers translate scores into specific actions, especially valuable in year one when leaders are learning to work with the data.
Close the loop. Tell your people what the data showed, what you’re doing about it, and when they’ll hear an update. This single step is what separates organizations that survey from organizations that improve.
