Engagement priority grid.
The lowest score in your survey is not necessarily your biggest problem. Plot each area by how much it matters and how well it is experienced, and the priorities sort themselves.
Score up to fourteen areas for importance and experience; get a grid of what to fix first, what to protect and what can wait. Nothing is stored.
Where the numbers come from
Experience is what most surveys already measure: the average score for the questions in each area, rescaled to 1–10. Importance is the question most surveys leave out. If your survey did not ask it, you can collect it quickly: ask people to pick the five areas that matter most to them (count how often each is picked and rescale), rank them, or rate each from 1 to 10. Forced choices produce sharper differences than ratings, because people cannot say everything matters.
For a team rather than a whole organisation, run it live: give everyone the list, ask each person to score importance and experience privately, and average the results on a flip chart.
How to read the four corners
- Priority – high importance, low experience. This is where action will be noticed and valued. Pick one or two, not all of them.
- Strength – high importance, high experience. Protect it, and tell people you know it matters. Strengths can be the first thing to erode during change.
- Watch – low importance, low experience. A low score here is real but not urgent; check whether it matters more to particular groups before parking it.
- Maintain – low importance, high experience. Keep it steady. If you are spending heavily here, ask whether the money would do more in the priority corner.
Then decide what to do
For each priority area, ask the people concerned which single change would make the most difference, and agree an owner and a date. The one-page action plan keeps it on track. For why this approach works better than ranking scores, read Why your engagement survey keeps saying the same thing.
Based on great{with}talent’s importance-and-experience method. The default list is the fourteen areas of working life used in our engagement research; replace them with your own survey’s areas. WinningFormula measures importance, experience and preferred actions in one survey.
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Send us your last engagement survey and we’ll show you what it’s missing – no charge, no deck, no obligation. Or start with a pilot or a 30-minute conversation.