The data-backed approach to elevating your HR strategy for better engagement & results

In the race to adapt to technological changes and global shifts, HR leaders often miss subtle cues from their teams. As they integrate AI into daily operations and strategize to motivate a diverse workforce, the rush to meet executive demands can widen the gap between HR intentions and employee realities — leading to misinterpretations of employee sentiments at work.

Indeed, employees continue to navigate the mental and emotional strain from recent years, compounded by today’s productivity pressures. This makes it more critical than ever for HR leaders to recognize their needs and provide the right support. Yet, for many employees, that support remains lacking, contributing to rising voluntary turnover.

It’s no surprise, then, that one in three professionals plans to change jobs within the next year. Today’s workforce is looking for roles that offer more flexibility, fair pay, and a people-centered workplace experience.*

For HR professionals aiming to tackle these challenges, the best starting point is data.‍

Leveraging insights from Leapsome’s first Workforce Trends Report, this article explores the significant misalignment between HR leaders and employees. It provides data-driven strategies designed to close these gaps, boost employee morale, and transition organizations into future-ready workplaces, all grounded in our comprehensive research and analytics.**

👀 Leapsome can help you create data-informed HR strategies

A brief walkthrough of our platform will show you how organizational leaders use Leapsome to streamline people management.

👉 Take a five-minute tour

*Leapsome’s Workforce Trends Report, 2024

**Leasome’s Workforce Trends Report, 2023
‍

The dangerous disconnect between HR and employees

A communication breakdown between workers and HR leaders is quietly undermining business resilience. Nearly one-third of employees feel uneasy reporting issues to their People team, significantly impairing HR’s capability to tackle urgent concerns. And that’s not the only gap between team members and People professionals:

• HR teams don’t fully understand their workforce — Only one in three HR leaders tracks essential metrics like engagement or attrition, and just a third of those use dedicated surveys to gather this critical data.
  
  This gap in understanding poses a serious challenge for businesses: Without clear insights into workforce sentiment and performance, HR leaders risk missing early warning signs of disengagement and turnover, making it harder to retain top talent and support employee well-being.
  ‍
  
  
• HR overestimates engagement — Only 31% of employees feel “completely engaged,” though HR estimates suggest over half are.
  
  Such a significant discrepancy can lead businesses to accrue hidden costs associated with disengagement. When employee engagement is overestimated, organizations risk overlooking underlying issues that can impact productivity, retention, and overall workplace morale. This finding underscores the urgent need for more effective engagement strategies and tools that accurately measure employee sentiment.
  ‍
  ‍
• HR leaders are too optimistic about employee well-being and mental health — HR leaders are too optimistic about employee well-being and mental health — 48% of HR leaders estimate that the state of employee mental health within their organization is “good” or “very good,” and no respondents report it as being “bad” or “very bad.” In contrast, only 49% of employees rate their mental health as “good,” with just 39% describing it as “very good” and 5% rating it as “bad.”
  
  If your company has 1,000 staff members, statistically, around 50 employees may be struggling with their mental health at work. Our 2024 research findings are even more concerning, with 55% of managers and 50% of individual contributors reporting that the negative impacts of workload on their personal well-being and mental health (already highlighted in our 2023 report) have worsened in the past year. This underscores the urgent need for HR leaders to address and better understand these growing challenges.
  ‍

• ‍Productivity drivers are changing, and efficiency is at stake — Many professionals view half of their meetings as unproductive, likely because one out of every three has no clear agenda. Leapsome addresses this with robust meeting features, including agenda-setting tools and action item tracking. Our AI-powered solutions, such as automated meeting summaries and work process optimization, take efficiency even further. Integrating AI into daily operations can help streamline processes, reduce burnout, and foster innovation — critical factors in today’s competitive market.
  ‍

📊 Unlock deeper Insights with Leapsome Surveys

Explore how Leapsome’s AI-backed surveys can help you understand your workforce and generate actionable insights for strategic decision-making.

👉 Learn more

How to provide for the new workforce with your HR strategy

Employees are quite open about what they’re looking for in a great company culture — provided they are engaged through meaningful questions and assured that their feedback will lead to real changes. Drawing from insights in Leapsome’s 2023 Workforce Trends Report, we’ve identified three critical areas where the global employee experience currently falls short. 

1. Feedback and communication: Employees seek open channels of communication where feedback is not only encouraged but acted upon. Our report underscores a substantial gap in how feedback is perceived by employees versus how it is utilized by management.
   
   
2. Career development and support: There is a clear need for better support regarding career progression. Employees favor environments where growth opportunities are not just available but also clearly communicated and supported.
   
   
3. Work-life balance: As work dynamics evolve, employees increasingly value flexibility and a balance that supports their well-being outside of work. Our data reveals a significant demand for policies that adapt to these changing lifestyle needs.

Each of these areas represents a key opportunity for HR leaders to align their strategies with the real needs of their workforce.

Employees want better feedback & guidance

Workers seek continuous feedback on their performance, with 75% expressing a desire for regular insights that are constructive and directly relevant to their roles and career goals. Moreover, a striking 79% of employees report that receiving such feedback boosts their productivity.

Unfortunately, we also found that a majority of professionals in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany have received hurtful feedback at their current jobs. But what does that actually look like?

“Bad feedback is often negative in nature and involves the use of exaggerated language, hyperbolic statements, sweeping generalizations, personal attacks, and unfounded criticisms,” notes Michelle Bennet, a seasoned sales enablement executive with extensive experience in communication strategies. According to Bennet, such feedback  tends to be “overexaggerated, vague and generic, lacking tact, and relying on hearsay.”

Good feedback, on the other hand, is:

• Specific — Draws on concrete examples and outcomes to clarify the impact of actions, eliminating personal bias.
  
• Timely — Delivered promptly, without waiting for scheduled performance reviews.
  
• Contextualized — Considers the whole person (competencies, talents, and daily performance), ensuring employees feel comprehensively assessed and not unfairly labeled.
• ‍Actionable — Offers clear, achievable suggestions for improvement, coupled with supportive guidance.

In remote or hybrid settings, where quick check-ins often require scheduling full meetings, Leapsome Instant Feedback offers a practical solution. Our tool supports asynchronous feedback exchanges that highlight individual company values. It also features an Anonymous Suggestion Box and Q&A boards, enabling leaders to keep track of employee sentiment without overly frequent surveys.

Employees want more frequent, effective performance reviews

A significant 52% of employees crave more frequent performance reviews, underscoring widespread dissatisfaction with the current annual or biannual assessment schedules. Despite that, roughly four out of five employees say that they feel their reviews offer a full picture of their performance.

One glaring issue here is bias. According to our findings, over one in five women (21%) feel that performance reviews don’t fully capture their skill set the way they do for men. This highlights the importance of mitigating bias in performance reviews, ensuring that all employees are fairly evaluated based on their actual contributions.

Thorough data-gathering and clear, equitable scoring during assessments are crucial to creating a more inclusive and accurate review process, where everyone’s abilities are recognized equally.

For instance, the HR team at Index uses something called behaviorally anchored rating scales — “BARS” for short — to create clear examples of “good” and “bad” work.

“Instead of just saying ‘great job’ or ‘needs improvement,’” shares Index’s People Culture and Development director Elena Bejan, “we give specific examples. [I]f we’re talking about teamwork, we might say, ‘Always helps others’ as a great example, or ‘Rarely shares information’ as a not-so-good one. This helps everyone understand what we mean by ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and makes it harder for our own feelings to get in the way.”

We also recommend using performance review software that can help you set up efficient, automatic review cycles and carry out more fair, data-driven evaluations. See how Leapsome Reviews provides a heatmap view of employee performance data so users can easily get a high-level understanding of the information and then investigate any discrepancies in scoring:

Employees need more alignment on company direction and support with productivity

There’s also a disconnect between HR and employees regarding where their companies are headed:

• 85% of employees feel they understand the organization’s direction and their role in it, yet only 61% of HR leaders believe employees truly grasp the company’s trajectory.
  ‍
• One-third of employees are unsatisfied with their organization’s processes for internal goal setting and KPI tracking, making it harder for them to monitor progress while contributing to business targets.

Without clear alignment, teams risk duplicating efforts, losing focus, or becoming disengaged—all of which dilute a company’s ability to reach its strategic goals. Leapsome Goals helps bridge this gap by offering structured, transparent goal setting that keeps everyone on track and empowers teams to see how their contributions feed into the bigger picture.

AI’s role in boosting efficiency and engagement

Thankfully, we found that many organizations are having great luck boosting efficiency with AI:

• Three in four employees now use AI tools weekly.
• 90% of these users report significant productivity boosts.
• Nine in ten HR leaders say that they use AI at least once a week, and 91% feel that it’s improved their HR processes.

As encouraging as these statistics are, organizations still have a lot of work to do when it comes to driving alignment and productivity. We recommend following a cascading goals framework, which enables leaders to set high-level business objectives for the year and collaborate with departments to set KPIs and targets that contribute directly to achieving them.
‍

Why people enablement is the missing piece of your business strategy (and a plan for putting it into action)

People enablement — a strategy that fosters employee growth and motivation — starkly contrasts with traditional methods that rely on rigid, top-down performance metrics. These older methods often exclude employees from decision-making, thereby hindering their engagement and productivity. Modern people enablement, on the other hand, is a collaborative approach that makes employees feel heard, understood, and valued as key players in your organization. 

As it would turn out, support for people enablement is at an all-time high, which also means it can be a great differentiator for your business in a competitive labor market. In fact, 97% of the HR leaders surveyed in our report say that their C-suite is either somewhat or very committed to prioritizing people enablement.

While a dedication to people enablement is a fantastic place to start, today’s businesses need to implement it in practical ways:

• Gain the insights you need to understand employees — Team members planning to leave their positions typically have higher levels of disengagement. By investing in more robust technology to track employee metrics like engagement, satisfaction, and turnover, HR leaders and other stakeholders can better understand staff sentiment and take meaningful action before it’s too late.
  
  We also recommend that people-centered organizations fully utilize all available tools, channels, and strategies to continuously measure and maintain employee engagement. For instance, you might use dedicated employee engagement surveys, anonymous suggestion boxes, and monthly pulse checks.
  ‍

• Give team members the support they need, from onboarding to exit — People professionals should encourage a feedback-rich culture cemented by continuous recognition, opportunities for candid exchange, and easy-to-implement frameworks to increase employee satisfaction and productivity.
  
  Within that culture, regular performance and 360° reviews can provide a roadmap for professional growth and development, keeping people aligned and engaged. To support and retain your best talent, commit to transparent compensation management and recurring benchmarking to ensure that everyone is being paid fairly and in line with current market dynamics.
  ‍

• Increase efficiency and create a productive work environment — By implementing a structured approach to meetings, using well-defined agendas, and assigning action items with clear deadlines, organizations can work more effectively and nurture a more productive culture.
  
  Look into leveraging AI-enhanced software to generate transparent career development frameworks, support managers in writing and summarizing actionable feedback, and offer tailored learning recommendations based on individual employee assessments. Overall, digital productivity tools can help your HR function streamline processes, facilitate collaboration, and manage projects effectively.

‍

Nurture organizational alignment and employee success with people enablement

If there’s anything our report highlights, it’s that you can’t know if your HR practices are outdated if you’re not leveraging the right data (or any data at all). Employees will tell you very clearly what they need if you ask — and if you show them that you’ll follow through on the initiatives they suggest.

‍Leapsome can help you do both. As a people enablement platform, we help companies bridge the gap between employees and HR teams with tools that foster continuous feedback, performance reviews that paint the whole picture, and goal-setting features that keep everyone working toward the same objectives.

Our software is also AI-powered, allowing you to analyze engagement surveys and summarize review results more quickly. It’ll even suggest customized action plans for you to follow based on engagement and assessment data, giving you more time to adapt those plans to your unique company needs.

As a full-stack HR solution, Leapsome makes it simple for organizations to design the people-centered work environments essential for organizational resilience and long-term success, regardless of external challenges.

🪴 Create a culture that fosters employee growth and happiness

Leapsome can automate processes for surveys, 360° reviews, goals, and even compensation, so you can make your workplace a fulfilling environment for everyone.

👉 Book a demo

Frequently asked questions about HR strategy

What is people enablement?

People enablement is an HR strategy designed to boost employee success and foster long-term organizational resilience. It stands on three pillars:

1. Alignment — Ensuring every team member understands the company’s direction and their role in pursuing it.
2. Individual support — Guiding each employee in recognizing their strengths and clarifying their role requirements.‍
3. Environment — Cultivating a culture that promotes success through continuous learning, psychological safety, and proactive feedback.