Key takeaways
- Only 8% of employees strongly agree their organization takes meaningful action on survey results, according to Gallup.
- The usual explanation, leadership indifference, is mostly wrong. The data typically cannot support a decision.
- Six failure points, most of which are set at design, months before anyone reads a result.
- Participation below 60% is itself the first finding, not a scheduling problem.
- US employee engagement stands at 31%, its lowest in more than a decade (Gallup, 2025).
Engagement survey results usually stall because the data cannot support a decision, not because leadership lacks the will to act. Gallup research finds that only 8% of employees strongly agree their company takes meaningful action on the results it collects. Survey Research Associates (SRA) has run engagement surveys for US law firms since 1991, and the failure is almost always designed in before fieldwork opens. [VERIFY both Gallup figures at source before publishing]
Isn't this just a leadership problem?
No, and blaming leadership is the explanation that requires no redesign. Managing partners rarely refuse to act on a clear finding with a defensible cost attached. What they refuse to do is commit budget and political capital on a number they cannot interpret.
Told that workload satisfaction scored 68, a managing partner has one reasonable question: compared with what? If nobody in the room can answer, waiting is the sensible decision. The survey then gets described as inconclusive, and the following year the firm debates whether to run it at all.
What actually stops the results being used?
Six causes, in rough order of how often they are the real one.
What does an actionable report look like?
Four elements, and a report missing any one of them will struggle to drive a decision.
- A peer comparison drawn from comparable US law firms, so every score arrives with context.
- Segmentation to the level where action happens, meaning practice group, office and seniority band, with suppression stated explicitly where response numbers require it.
- A ranked driver analysis showing which dimensions predict intent to stay at your firm. This is frequently not the dimension leadership expects.
- An explicit priority list separating what is fixable this year from what is structural.
Want results your leadership can act on? Our law firm engagement survey service delivers peer benchmarks, segmented reporting and a driver analysis built for US law firms.
Should we run a survey if we cannot act on the results?
Probably not, and that is the uncomfortable answer. Legal talent consultants put it plainly in the context of upward reviews: if you cannot or will not act on the feedback, do not ask for it, because failing to act undermines the effort and damages morale.
The same logic applies to engagement surveys and the mechanism is compounding. Asking twice and changing nothing does not produce a neutral result. It teaches people that responding is pointless, which lowers participation and candor in every cycle after.
If budget or timing means nothing can change this year, run a shorter pulse, be explicit about scope, and say what you will and will not be acting on.
Does a low participation rate mean the survey failed?
It means the survey already produced its first finding. Participation is a trust measure. People who doubt a process do not send complaints, they decline to take part.
It also biases everything downstream. Respondents under friction skew toward the most engaged and the most aggrieved, and neither group represents the firm.
With US employee engagement at 31%, its lowest in over a decade according to Gallup's 2025 State of the Global Workplace, and manager engagement down nine percentage points since 2022, the population you are trying to measure is already harder to reach than it was three years ago. [VERIFY at Gallup source]
What should we do differently in the next cycle?
Decide what decision the survey is meant to inform before writing a single question.
A survey designed to produce a report produces a report. A survey designed to answer "which practice groups are at risk of losing people, and why" produces an answer.
Then work backward:
- The segmentation you need determines the population
- The driver analysis determines the dimensions
- The benchmark determines the comparison set
- The decision date determines the fieldwork window
With US associate attrition at 19% in 2025 and a record 83% of departures happening within five years of hire (NALP Foundation, CY2025), the cost of an inconclusive survey is not the survey budget. It is another year without knowing.
Frequently asked questions
How soon after fieldwork should results be delivered? Fast enough that findings still attach to something. Weeks, not months.
Should we share results with the whole firm? Share something. Firms that survey and then say nothing teach people that responding is pointless.
What if the results are bad? You have found something before it turned into departures. The useful question at the debrief is which findings are actionable and in what order.
How often should we run a full engagement survey? Annually, with a shorter pulse in between. More frequent full surveys produce fatigue without new information.
Can we add our own questions? Yes. Keep the core stable so year-over-year comparison holds.
Turn survey results into decisions
SRA has designed and run engagement surveys for US law firms since 1991, benchmarked against comparable firms rather than a cross-industry norm.
Contact us · Survey Research Associates, Inc. · 30 Wall Street, 8th Floor, New York, NY 10005 · 800-523-8350
Related reading
- Top 7 Leadership Red Flags in Law Firms
- How to Leverage eNPS to Reflect and Improve Firm Culture
- How to Create Impactful Performance Review Reports for Attorneys
.png){kind=small}