Employee Surveys: The Overlooked Key to Value-Led Engagement

Introducing Employee Surveys

In the evolving world of organisational culture and customer experience, success isn’t just driven by what customers think, it’s also shaped by how engaged your employees are. At Mackman Research, we believe that truly valuable insight comes from inside the organisation as much as from the outside. That’s why employee surveys are a vital but often underused tool. They don’t just measure satisfaction; they capture something deeper — how well your workforce understands and embodies your organisational values. 

While customer feedback remains a key pillar of strategy development, employee engagement surveys can offer a critical missing link. Employees who buy into an organisation’s values are not only more productive — they’re also the people who most effectively transmit those values to your customers. In this article, we explore how employee surveys can measure engagement, assess alignment with values, and sit alongside customer surveys to provide a 360° view of your organisation’s health. 

Understanding the Value of Employee Insight

When organisations invest in regular employee surveys, they create a channel for authentic feedback that’s essential to measuring the true cultural health of a business. Employee engagement surveys go beyond simple satisfaction metrics — they reveal whether your people feel connected to their work, respected in their roles, and aligned with the bigger picture. When staff understand and support your organisational purpose and values, that belief is naturally passed on to your customers in every interaction. 

In contrast, disengagement can go unnoticed until it shows up in poor performance, high turnover, or inconsistent customer experience. Understanding how employees really feel about their roles, their teams, their leaders, and your values can bring focus to internal development efforts and prevent issues from escalating. In our experience, some of the most transformative insights come from the inside. 

The Power of Mirrored Surveying: Employees and Customers

It’s not uncommon for businesses to place customer feedback at the heart of performance monitoring, and rightly so. CSAT and NPS scores provide essential insight into service quality and reputation. However, when customer insight isn’t mirrored with internal feedback from employees, you risk missing a key part of the puzzle. 

For example, a drop in customer satisfaction might not be the result of service processes but instead can stem from disengaged staff who no longer feel supported or clear on your values. By conducting parallel customer and employee surveys, you’re more likely to spot where messages or behaviours are getting lost in translation. This ‘mirrored research’ approach provides a 360° lens that helps to unearth transmission issues: where internal understanding fails to carry through into external perception. 

In particular, questions that explore how well employees understand and can articulate the company’s purpose, values, and goals can reveal alignment gaps. These gaps often explain inconsistencies in brand experience and highlight development opportunities that wouldn’t otherwise come to light.  

Adding Strategic Value Through Internal Research

Employee surveys need to be more than just a pulse check. They should be crafted to capture deep insight including emotional connection to work, value alignment, and motivation. The goal is not to box-tick, but to use that data to shape your internal culture and support meaningful change. 

As with any research, successful employee insight work begins with clear aims: What do you want to understand? What will you do with the findings? And how will you communicate outcomes back to your teams? By considering employees as stakeholders in the same way you consider customers, you create a feedback loop that’s honest, inclusive, and ultimately far more effective. 

Conclusion

At Mackman Research, we believe that employee insight should sit alongside customer insight as a strategic priority. When internal engagement and values alignment are measured regularly, organisations gain the clarity needed to support their teams, reinforce their values, and deliver consistently excellent experiences. Conducting employee surveys not only brings the voice of your team to the table, it also supports better decision-making, improves communication, and ensures that your values are more than just words on a wall. Because when your people believe in what you stand for, your customers will too. 

With Mackman Research as your partner, you can be confident that your employee research efforts will deliver tangible outcomes that drive business growth and success–even on a tight budget. Get in touch with us today at customerservice@mackmanresearch.co.uk or call us on 01787 388038.