From Silence to Signals: How One Manufacturer Turned Engagement into a Business-Critical Intelligence Tool

Disengaged employees were 3.4x more likely to leave than their engaged peers

Employees who didn’t respond to the survey were 2.78x more likely to leave within three months 

Those with low engagement took 62% more sick days, impacting productivity and team stability

The Challenge

After years of silence, a leading food manufacturer came to us with a simple question: What are our people really thinking—and why does it matter?

The company hadn’t run a formal engagement survey in several years, and while leadership had strong instincts and good intentions, they had little data—and less clarity—on their employee's experience.

In an industry where safety, quality, and operational consistency are non-negotiable, they knew that lack of visibility wasn’t just a blind spot, but also a serious risk.

Engagement maturity was low and conversations about culture rarely made it past the factory floor. While the business had a strong operational focus, the connection between employee experience and important outcomes like safety, retention, and performance wasn’t yet fully understood, or even prioritised. They didn't need sentiment scores. They needed real evidence: clear, compelling data that would shift mindsets and spark action. Our role wasn’t just to deliver numbers, but to help leadership to see what they hadn’t yet measured, and guide them to connect engagement to the performance of their people and their business.

Our Approach

We began with a comprehensive survey, tailored to reflect the structure and operating context of each core division. Safety and quality—mission-critical in this industry—were deeply embedded from the start.

The results revealed a dual reality.

While safety and quality culture scored highly, confirming strong procedural foundations, there was significantly less focus on the human side of culture—how people feel, how they connect to the business, and whether they feel heard. Gaps in communication, low psychological safety, and a prevailing belief that “nothing would change” after the survey pointed to a deeper cultural misalignment.

Until this point, engagement had been viewed as adjacent to performance; important, but not essential. But the data changed that. It illuminated not just sentiment, but a risk.

To sharpen the insight, we linked the results with hard business outcomes: sickness absence and employee turnover. That’s where the deeper patterns surfaced. What emerged was not isolated or incidental—it was systemic, and it explained why attrition was rising despite strong performance on safety and compliance metrics.

Insights and Impact

The insights showed that disengagement wasn’t a future risk; but a present signal showing up in turnover, absence, and silence. Furthermore, it was a leading indicator of flight risk, not over 12 months, but within a single quarter.

• Employees who didn’t participate in the survey were 2.78x more likely to leave within three months.
• Disengaged employees were 3.4x more likely to leave than their engaged peers—and one in four had already exited within 90 days.

The pattern extended to sickness absence. Employees with low engagement scores took 62% more sick days than their engaged peers, not just impacting productivity, but team stability and delivery.

When we translated these trends into cost accounting for lost productivity, recruitment, onboarding, and training, the case was clear. Even modest improvements in engagement stood to unlock significant financial returns through reduced absence, lower attrition, and faster onboarding.

This was the turning point 

The Shift

Once we mapped colleague experience and sentiment to real-world outcomes (like turnover, absenteeism, and cost) engagement was no longer a side conversation, it became weaved into the fabric of organizational strategy. But the turning point came when we moved from insight to action, highlighting quick wins and showing managers exactly how to make an impact where it mattered most.

The best part? This is just the start.

What’s Next

This work has laid the foundation for Phase Two, where we’ll go deeper. Using behavioural insights, we’ll identify the leadership habits that drive sustained engagement and give every manager clear, context-specific guidance they can act on.

This allows us to go far beyond measuring culture anymore, but to shape it: together.

We’re now embedding behavioural research to identify the specific leadership and management behaviours that drive high engagement. Every manager will have clear, practical guidance. Not just data, but a clear, easy-to-follow direction.

We’re also strengthening the listening ecosystem:

• Division-specific survey tailoring continues
• Executive and frontline insight sessions are now sharper and more frequent
• Employee rep groups are shaping future survey design—building shared ownership and trust

With participation rising and engagement becoming part of the infrastructure, leaders are no longer measuring culture, they're shaping it.

In Their Words

“Looking at the survey results alongside our own internal data helped us tell a clearer story—and show why engagement matters to the business. It’s helped us shift how we think about culture, and there’s now a stronger understanding across the board. The process has been collaborative and focused, and we’re ready for what comes next.”