The engagement survey is dying. Here's what replaces it.

Hi everyone, and welcome. I'm Ryan Starks, and I lead marketing here at Rising Team. Today's topic comes from an article Jennifer wrote for Fast Company, and it's intentionally a little bit provocative: the engagement survey is dying. We'll explain why we think that, and what we're seeing companies do instead.

Jennifer Dulski is our founder and CEO. She's led large orgs and teams at Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Change.org, and she teaches leadership at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. She has run plenty of engagement surveys, and those experiences helped inspire her to found Rising Team. Mitch Braig leads our strategic accounts and works with enterprise customers every day, so he sees what managers actually use and what they need to lead their teams successfully in today's work environment. Jen, over to you.

Thanks. This survey was often the bane of my existence working in big companies. I led pretty big divisions in most of the big tech companies, and I was very used to getting this survey back. You do it typically once a year, maybe twice. Everyone takes it. Then comes the dreaded day when you get your results back: a giant report, sliced a bunch of different ways. Some things went up, some things went down, and we never had any real idea why.

We knew we had to do something, because it was important to show people we were listening, but we were never sure what to do. That was true for me as an executive, and it was definitely true for every manager in my org. We'd ask people to make action plans, and we'd put together tiger teams and task forces to act on the different factors. But it took time to come up with ideas, nobody really knew what to do, and by the time we implemented things, we were never sure if they worked, because the next survey was a year away. That was a really problematic setup, and we knew there had to be a better way.

So: the last time you took an engagement survey, what happened? Did everyone act on it immediately, but things didn't move? Did you share the results and not much changed? Did you make action plans, but things faded away? Were you not sure what to do? Or, I suppose, there's the perfect outcome where everything worked great, but I have not seen that happen very many times.

The votes are in: 67% said they shared the results and not much changed, and 33% said they made action plans but things faded away.

That's pretty typical. Even by the time the results come back, people often aren't sure those are still the most relevant factors, because it took time for the survey to run and be scored. The good news is there's a better system. But there was a reason we measured all of this in the first place, so I'm going to turn it over to Mitch to talk about why engagement surveys mattered, and what's changing.

Thanks, Jen. So what does the data tell us? Gallup measured over three million employees to tie engagement to business outcomes, and the results were dramatic. Teams that are more engaged are 23% more profitable, with 18% higher productivity and 32% fewer quality defects. We often think of engagement as something that belongs to learning and development and HR, but its impact on the business is tremendous.

There are more tools than ever for measuring engagement; there's an entire industry dedicated to it. And despite that, engagement isn't getting better. Only 31% of US employees are engaged, completely flat from last year, while 18% are actively disengaged. Gallup estimates this costs businesses up to $2 trillion a year in lost productivity. Companies have the resources to get really good at measuring engagement, but measuring the problem isn't the same as solving it.

AI transformation is happening across nearly every industry, and it makes engagement more important than ever. Companies are investing billions of dollars in AI, and they can't afford to let those investments fail. BCG highlights that 70% of AI transformation success comes down to the managers and teams leading through it, compared with just 30% attributed to the technology and infrastructure behind it. The technology matters, but it's people, culture and effective leadership that drive adoption. If leaders aren't put in a position to lead through this change, businesses face a massive risk: AI investments designed to increase efficiency and lower operating costs could have the exact opposite outcome.

So how do we solve for it? The solution isn't another survey or another way to collect feedback. Organizations already have plenty of data telling them where the challenges are. What's been missing is a scalable way to turn those insights into meaningful action that actually improves the employee experience. We already know what great leadership looks like: building psychological safety, giving effective feedback, coaching employees and creating strong team connections. Most organizations have leadership frameworks and values that reinforce those behaviors. The challenge is getting managers to put them into practice consistently.

Why haven't traditional tools solved this? Historically, leadership development has struggled with three things: personalization, scale and lasting behavior change. Traditional training is often one size fits all, so it doesn't resonate with the individual. One-on-one coaching does resonate, but it's incredibly expensive and very difficult to scale. And without ongoing reinforcement, lessons get lost; even great programs struggle to have a lasting impact. Managers need support that's relevant to their individual challenges, in the flow of work, in the moments those challenges come up.

AI fundamentally changes what's possible. For the first time, businesses can deliver personalized leadership development and meaningful organizational insights, in three important ways. First, we can gather insights in real time. Instead of predetermined questions in a survey that goes out once a year, people talk privately with an AI coach about what's top of mind: real challenges, real goals and real needs that come up every day. Second, we can aggregate those insights into anonymous organizational trends, giving HR, leadership development teams and leaders visibility into what's happening across teams, functions and locations, and which challenges are emerging. Rather than waiting on an engagement survey, we see it in real time and can shape the leadership development strategy around it.

Third, and most importantly, we can turn those insights into personalized action. That's what we've built with Arti. We take what we learn about each individual and create a personalized growth plan specific to them: their tenure, team size, strengths, weaknesses and goals. Then we provide ongoing, tailored coaching that lets managers practice critical leadership skills in the flow of work.

I got excited just hearing you talk about it, because it's essentially the thing I wished I'd had as a leader of large orgs. Instead of getting the survey back and not knowing what to do, I understand in real time what's happening. And not only do I know what's happening, I know every single person facing a challenge has support to work on it, in real time. That's a huge relief as the leader of an organization.

I use a lot of sports analogies, as my team knows. As an org leader, the best practices in leadership, the way I want high-performing teams to deliver, are kind of like the triathlon of leadership. I want everyone to reach the same outcome: to be able to run that triathlon. But people start at really different points. I have some swimmers on the team and some people who've never been in the water. Some love to run and some hate it. If we want them all to reach the same outcome from very different starting points, rather than putting them in cohorts and teaching them all the same thing at the same time, the ideal is to give each of them a personal trainer.

A personal trainer understands where you're starting from and where you want to get to, and makes a plan that helps you get there in small, achievable steps. They help you see what good looks like, and they cheer you on while you're working on it. That's essentially what AI can do for people now, and what we've built with Arti.

A question from the audience: how is impact measured, and how can the platform be customized?

That's incredibly important, especially to the people leading these organizations. I care about impact: not just whether people will use the tool and like it, but whether it moves the business numbers that matter. Retention: will employees stay longer when they use tools like Rising Team? Manager effectiveness: how do teams rate the quality of their managers? And productivity: will people perform better and more efficiently? At Rising Team, we see large, statistically significant increases in all of those: employee retention, manager effectiveness, productivity and employee engagement.

We think of Arti as a leadership and effectiveness personal trainer. It does an intake with each person, schedules time with them on their calendar, checks in with them through chat, cheers them on and reminds them of what they want to be doing. And it has four modes. Before, after a survey, we'd need action-planning tiger teams, or we could bring in a couple of external coaches or facilitators, which was really expensive, and each of them has only one mode. An executive coach is amazing at one thing: asking great questions and pulling wisdom out of people. Arti can do that too. That's its coaching mode.

Sometimes you want your personal trainer to help you actually get stuff done. So the second mode is working sessions, where instead of drawing out your wisdom, Arti helps you do things, and do them faster: writing a self-review that sounds the way you want, or drafting a framework for deciding what your team should prioritize. All sorts of deliverables. The third mode is role play: voice-to-voice practice of hard conversations. And the fourth mode, the most unique part of the system, is built-in team building. Arti helps you run synchronous, interactive sessions with your team, where they feel supported and you gain insight. We call it team intelligence.

Together, this works as a system. Arti gets to know you and your team, and uses that to personalize your coaching, so every piece of guidance is based on real insight about you and your team.

To the question about customization: the entire system is customizable. We build it on your company values, your leadership frameworks, your systems for giving feedback, and your guardrails. Some companies say, "We only want people to talk about topics A, B and C, and not these other topics at work," and we customize that as well. So the system is customized to the company, to the individual and to the team: three layers of customization.

And the insights come in real time. Instead of waiting for the annual survey to hear that people don't feel they're growing in their careers, or don't feel appreciated, you see the challenges people are facing, the conversations they're practicing, and the areas they're working on with Arti, and you know that at the same moment they raise those challenges, they're getting support.

All conversations with Arti are 100% private, so people really do talk about the things that matter to them deeply. We anonymize and aggregate at the trend level, so the organization sees what's happening broadly, while each individual conversation stays personal and private.

It really does move the needle. We see a 30% increase in trust and connection scores, and a 20% or greater lift in manager effectiveness scores, within one single quarter. The same goes for pride in working at the company: eNPS and similar numbers go up, not just over time but against a control group. We measure with and without Rising Team, and see large lifts in test versus control. Longer term, we see gains in employee retention and in productivity, like issue resolution on customer support or IT teams.

On retention: the more often and the more recently someone has used it, the more likely they are to stay at the company, because they feel valued, supported and understood. That drives large lifts in retention and strong ROI, because the cost of churn is high.

We work with some of the world's most innovative, largest companies, and this holds no matter the type of company: retail, manufacturing, tech or banking. The science of high-performing leaders and teams is the same across all of them. It's what I teach in my class at Stanford's business school, and it's what we see in the data in our product: whatever the organization, they see the same results in the business metrics that matter to them.

Now for a demo. We'll show a personalized growth plan, including what an intake with Arti looks like; a voice-to-voice role play of a hard conversation; and a team session, with the insight it creates.

This is Arti. I've pre-populated an intake, so you can see it from start to finish. This version isn't customized for a specific company, since we keep our customers' details private, but you can imagine the intake customized for your organization: the questions can change, and we can add the company values or leadership behaviors people should focus on.

The intake has two parts. It starts by getting to know you. This person is an engineering director. Arti finds out whether you're an individual contributor, manage individuals, manage managers or even manage executives, so it tailors the experience to your level. This director manages a team of six, four managers and two very senior engineers, in payments and infrastructure, with an extended team of about 30 people.

Arti asks how the team works together and how it's going. They explain that they're stretched thin and pretty stressed right now, which is what we hear from every one of our customers. They're using AI a lot more in their work and are expected to use it even more. People are adapting at different rates: some are really excited and some are frustrated. And the team is spread across multiple locations, so they don't see each other very often. That's a lot to navigate, as Arti notes.

Then Arti asks about your engagement results, because until that survey is gone, companies are still running it, and we want to make it easier for leaders and teams to make action plans from their pulse results. I just entered the areas that needed the most attention, but I could have pasted in or uploaded my entire survey results. Arti will read them, understand them and make recommendations.

Arti asks what I do well, which I said is driving execution and prioritizing work, and then the rest of the focus is on what's hard, so this feels like support for your most important challenges. I said the hardest part is leading through change right now, because there are so many changes at once: the shift to AI, new people, new leadership. This person has a new CTO, which means new processes and new priorities, and they're worried about telling their team that work they've been doing is being deprioritized. Arti also asks about their OKRs, so this is a tool that helps them reach their goals, not something separate on the side. A year from now, what they most want to see is their team having more impact.

In part two, Arti helps them pick a first focus area, like a personal trainer would: is it arm day or leg day? The focus they picked was one of their goals: getting everyone on the team to 80% AI-written code, which we know is a mandate in a lot of organizations. They'd know it was working when they saw it in their commits and felt less resistance from the team. They have nothing in place yet, they want it done by the end of the quarter, and it's essential.

Then Arti asks how much time they want to spend on it. Surprisingly, people choose a fair amount of time: we started with 10 minutes a week as the lowest option, and it turns out 60% of people choose 30 minutes or more a week to work with Arti on the things that matter to them and their team. Arti also encourages them to work with their team, and asks whether they want to run a session with them.

Now Arti gives them the first focus area of their coaching plan, and it uses all the modes: working sessions to create deliverables, coaching sessions to go back and forth and find the right solution, a role play (a conversation with a hesitant engineer), and a team session. When I approve the plan, Arti goes to my calendar, finds a time and books the sessions. I'm a late-afternoon person, so I pick weekdays at 4:30. Arti integrates with chat and calendar, and even with LLMs, so you can use Arti from Claude or Copilot.

What do we mean by a team session? Rising Team includes hundreds of synchronous, interactive sessions people can run with their own teams. Some are longer, like Working Styles, where you create a user manual for how you operate. In Natural Talents, everyone gets a spider chart of the things that energize them most and come most easily to them, so you can see how to put people on projects together. There's a kit for appreciation, where you learn how people like to be appreciated. And there are hundreds of what we call Minis: single questions you add to your regular meetings to capture a little insight and build connection, like "What makes your day better at work?" or "What's a personal hope or dream you have?" All of that goes into Arti, which remembers those insights about your team and uses them in its coaching.

Back in the trainer, Arti reminds me what we're working on today: defining the AI coding standard. Or, if something else is top of mind, it'll say let's do that instead, just like a trainer. You show up and they say it's arm day, and you say, "Actually, I sprained my wrist. Can we work on legs?" Arti adjusts to your needs too.

Role play is what helps people practice the tough things they often avoid. Many times these are conversations people don't have at all, because they don't know how, and that means neither the leader nor the team is performing at its best. Here, Arti says: I know you have some hesitant engineers; let's run a scenario where we practice talking to one of them.

It gives me scenarios to choose from, or I can bring any real conversation of my own. It's offering someone who believes AI-generated code is lowering quality and is resisting it; a team member who feels it's eroding their skills as a coder; or someone who's been vocal about their frustration and is influencing others on the team. These are hard situations, and they're all really happening. It's exactly what we hear from customers, and what the research from BCG, McKinsey and others shows: AI transformations fail when we throw tools at people without supporting them through the tough personal transitions they have to make.

I'll pick number three, probably the hardest: someone who's not only frustrated but influencing the team negatively. Next, Arti shows me the people on my team. This is one of the most unique things about the system: because we've done those team sessions together, it knows the people on my team.

And before I jump into the conversation, Arti gives me best practices from leadership science for a conversation like this, along with what it knows about Ted. Craft is Ted's top daily motivator, so since he cares about his personal craft, it makes sense that he's frustrated by AI. He also values clear thinking and honest dialogue.

So I'm practicing a one-on-one with Ted, who's been vocal about his concerns. Arti's key principles: lead with curiosity, not a counterargument, because his concerns are real. Separate the concern from the conclusion. And invite him into the solution: Ted is a clear thinker who values craft, so position him as someone who can help define what good AI-assisted code looks like. It gives me examples of what good language sounds like, and a starting script, which stays in a side panel while I practice. Then I choose voice mode or text mode, since not everyone is somewhere they can practice out loud every time.

In voice mode, Arti says, "Hi, I'm Ted, and I'm here to practice this conversation with you. I'll act as Ted. If you want to pause any time and get coaching, just say 'coach me.' And if you want to redirect my behavior, to be more defensive or more open, you can do that, and I'll change my behavior any time." Then I practice with Arti as if it's Ted: I give my thoughts, and it responds. I often pause in the middle and say, "Can you try that again, and get a little more upset?" so I can run the conversation in its hardest possible version. At the end, it gives me a score and suggestions.

We modeled the role play on the class I teach at Stanford's GSB, which is 100% role-play based. The scoring is based on three things. The first is effectiveness against your objective: Arti asks you to pick one, what you want to get out of the conversation, and scores you on how well you achieved it. The second is clarity: how clear you were in what you were trying to get across. The third is empathy: whether you showed empathy and compassion to the person you were talking to. The balance between clarity and empathy is where we want people to land.

If you want to see how this works for your organization, we'd be happy to set up a customized demo, with Arti tailored to your frameworks and values, to show you how it would work for people in your organization.

A question from the audience: is Ted's profile based on interpretations of his priorities from an individual survey or an assessment tool? Or are there other things that can be brought into it?

Besides the trainer, there's on-demand chat and role play any time you want it. Let me start a new chat: "Can you remind me everything you know about Rebecca?" I picked a different person on my team, to show the kinds of insights. There are several sources. The first and primary one is team sessions, like the talents assessment. From them, you can see what she values, how she prefers to be appreciated, what she struggles with and her career aspirations. I can then say, "I need to give her feedback about this. What should I do?" and Arti will write me a script.

The second source is asynchronous team building through chat. You can add Arti to team channels in Slack or Teams, where it asks questions like "How do you prefer to get constructive feedback?" People answer in the channel, and Arti remembers. The third is that you can upload additional information, like Myers-Briggs or StrengthsFinder results. And the fourth is that Arti has memory. We believe information about people should generally come from them directly, which is why we take it from team sessions. But as a manager or colleague, you can also tell Arti, "Last time I talked to Ryan, he was excited about this idea," and it will remember that too.

So there are four ways Arti gets information about people. The one thing we do not do is pull from one person's Arti conversations into another's. If I tell Arti, "I'm really struggling with this," that will never go to my manager.

Here's what I mean by a team session. People join together through a QR code or a link. One person facilitates, usually the manager, and as they click next, everyone else's devices go to the same page. There's a question, everyone answers it, and they can choose an image or have Arti generate one. When you're ready to share, you move through each person's answers. For example, in one of these real sessions, Ted said, "Everything gets better when I break up my day with an outdoor activity." So if I ask Arti, "Ted's really burned out. How do I support him?" it might pull this up: Ted said he likes breaking up his day.

One more question: are management and leadership best practices built in? Yes, a lot. We start with all the leadership science in the baseline LLMs. Then we add the content from all our Rising Team kits, and all the content I teach in my class. And then we add your company's own leadership principles and content. So there's a lot of leadership science and best practice built in.