Insight

Beyond sentiment: why the smartest organisations are tracking behaviour, not just engagement scores

Engagement isn’t dead, but how we measure it might be.

For years, employee engagement has been synonymous with surveys, tracking how people feel at work. But in 2024, a growing body of research, and real-world transformation stories, are exposing a flaw in that approach: people’s feelings and people’s behaviours aren’t always aligned.

And when behaviour, not sentiment, is what drives change, performance, and culture… maybe it’s time we stopped asking how people feel and started paying more attention to what they do.

The engagement gap we don’t talk about

Studies are indicating that a majority of digital transformation initiatives fail to achieve their intended outcomes. For example a 2022 McKinsey article reports that approximately 70% of large-scale transformation efforts fall short of their goals. ​

Similar research from the Boston Consulting Group found that only 30% of business transformations are successful, with 26% resulting in complete failure and 44% delivering suboptimal results.

But why? Misalignment. Leaders failed to articulate:

• Why change was necessary
• How change would happen
• What behaviours were expected of people
• What successful transformation would look like, in practice

And yet, most organisations still measure “engagement” by asking:

• Do you feel supported?
• Do you trust leadership?
• Are you satisfied at work?

Useful? Maybe.
Sufficient? Not anymore.

What The Data (and Behaviour) Says

According to Deloitte’s Human Capital Trends and Gartner’s 2024 Survey, fewer than 25% of organisations are actively tracking behavioural indicators of engagement. Things like initiative taking, collaboration, decision ownership and change participation.
Meanwhile:

• 82% of HR leaders say they are investing in improving engagement scores.
• But only 19% say they can reliably link those scores to real behaviour on the ground.

It’s a disconnect, and one that smart organisations are starting to correct.

Case in point: large banks ‘culture hack’

A multi-year transformation journey shows what it looks like when an organisation moves beyond sentiment to behavioural alignment.
In their own words:
“Normal engagement measures sentiment. But sentiment and behaviour can diverge. Staff disliked the change, but remained committed, as evidenced through their behaviour.”
They rebuilt engagement around stress related growth, using positive psychology and a behavioural playbook:

• Lateral movement across roles as a measure of agility
• Voluntary professionalisation as a signal of growth mindset
• Iterative restructures as proof of adaptive capability
• Clear behavioural expectations linked to strategy execution

They didn’t just track how people felt.
They watched what people did and used that as the signal of transformation.

What leading organisations are doing differently

Organisations who are ahead of the curve are:

• Measuring initiative, not just morale
• Looking at decision making patterns, not just survey scores
• Tracking participation in innovation, not just feedback on it
• Using data to reward behaviours that drive the strategy, not just attitude

These are the behavioural metrics that matter:

• Role mobility and redeployment
• Strategic collaboration across silos
• Proactive engagement with change
• Uptake of digital tools and agile practices
• Leadership visibility and challenge orientation

Final thought – the metrics we track become the culture we get

If you measure comfort, you’ll get compliance.
If you measure behaviour, you’ll get performance, growth and momentum.
In a world where transformation is constant, organisations can no longer afford to manage engagement through sentiment alone.
The organisations that win will be the ones that treat engagement not as a mood to be managed, but as a pattern of behaviour that drives the future forward.
Because what people do has always mattered more than what they say. We’re just now learning how to measure it properly.