Quarterly Employee Engagement Pulse: Q3 2025

Generated October 6, 2025 · 312 responses out of 410 employees (76% response rate) · 10 Likert items across four dimensions · Anonymous mode with k-anonymity floor of 5
Source: 410-person services company, two departments reporting separately to People & Culture

Plain-English summary

Bottom line: the engagement scale shows strong internal consistency (alpha = 0.88, omega = 0.89), so the composite score and dimension scores can be reported to leadership with confidence. Overall engagement is healthy, with the strongest scores on alignment and team belonging and the weakest on workload sustainability and growth pathways.

What stands out:

Composite engagement is 3.96 of 5.0; 72% of respondents land in the top-two boxes (4 or 5) on the overall engagement item.
Workload sustainability (Q7) is the lowest item at 3.42. Open-ended comments cluster around staffing thinness and back-to-back meetings.
Customer Success (CS) outperformed Engineering (ENG) on belonging and recognition; ENG outperformed CS on autonomy and growth. Composite gap is 0.18, small.
Removing any single item would lower alpha, indicating no items are weakening the instrument.
Manager quality is the single strongest driver of overall engagement (standardized beta = 0.34, p < 0.001) ahead of recognition and growth.

Reliability summary

Cronbach's alpha

0.881

good internal consistency

McDonald's omega

0.893

95% CI [0.871, 0.911]

KMO sampling adequacy

0.894

meritorious

Sample / items

312 · 10

8 responses dropped (incomplete Likert)

Dimension-level reliability

Dimension	Items	Mean	SD	Alpha	Omega
Alignment with purpose	Q1, Q2	4.18	0.74	0.84	0.85
Manager and recognition	Q3, Q4, Q5	4.02	0.81	0.87	0.88
Growth and autonomy	Q6, Q7, Q8	3.71	0.88	0.79	0.81
Belonging and intent to stay	Q9, Q10	4.08	0.76	0.82	0.83

Each dimension clears the 0.70 threshold and would survive an audit defense. Growth and autonomy is the weakest dimension on both reliability and mean score; the open-ended themes below explain why.

Item-total statistics

#	Item	Mean	SD	Corrected r_it	Alpha if deleted
Q1	I understand how my work contributes to the company's goals.	4.21	0.72	0.621	0.870
Q2	I believe in what this company is trying to accomplish.	4.15	0.77	0.654	0.867
Q3	My manager gives me feedback I can act on.	4.04	0.85	0.703	0.864
Q4	My manager treats me with respect.	4.31	0.73	0.611	0.871
Q5	I feel recognized when I do good work.	3.71	0.92	0.682	0.866
Q6	I have meaningful opportunities to grow in my role.	3.68	0.93	0.671	0.867
Q7	My workload is sustainable week to week.	3.42	0.98	0.524	0.879
Q8	I have the autonomy I need to do my job well.	4.02	0.81	0.589	0.874
Q9	I feel I belong on my team.	4.18	0.74	0.665	0.868
Q10	I see myself working here a year from now.	3.98	0.89	0.694	0.865

Every item shows a corrected item-total correlation above 0.50 and an alpha-if-deleted below the overall 0.881. Q7 (workload) is the weakest contributor but still meets the threshold; the item stays in the scale.

Department comparison (k-anonymity floor 5)

Item	Engineering (n=148)	Customer Success (n=164)	Difference
Q1 · Goal alignment	4.18	4.24	+0.06
Q2 · Belief in mission	4.08	4.22	+0.14
Q3 · Actionable feedback	3.91	4.16	+0.25
Q4 · Manager respect	4.25	4.37	+0.12
Q5 · Recognition	3.54	3.87	+0.33
Q6 · Growth opportunities	3.82	3.55	-0.27
Q7 · Sustainable workload	3.31	3.52	+0.21
Q8 · Autonomy	4.18	3.87	-0.31
Q9 · Team belonging	4.04	4.31	+0.27
Q10 · Intent to stay	3.92	4.04	+0.12
Composite mean	3.92	4.02	+0.10

Composite Cohen's d = 0.12 (small). Customer Success leads on recognition, feedback, and belonging; Engineering leads on autonomy and growth. Three smaller subgroups (Finance n=4, Legal n=3, Office Ops n=4) are hidden by the k-anonymity floor of 5.

Key driver analysis (outcome: overall engagement item)

Driver	Pearson r	Standardized beta	95% CI	Quadrant
Manager feedback quality (Q3)	0.61	0.34	[0.24, 0.44]	Fix First
Recognition (Q5)	0.58	0.28	[0.19, 0.37]	Fix First
Growth opportunities (Q6)	0.55	0.21	[0.12, 0.30]	Fix First
Belief in mission (Q2)	0.49	0.14	[0.05, 0.23]	Protect
Team belonging (Q9)	0.47	0.11	[0.02, 0.20]	Protect
Workload sustainability (Q7)	0.41	0.09	[0.00, 0.18]	Monitor

Action Priority Map plots importance (beta) against performance (mean score). Manager feedback, recognition, and growth all land in the Fix First quadrant: high importance, lower performance. Belief in mission and team belonging land in Protect: high importance, high performance, do not erode.

Inter-item correlation matrix (engagement composite)

	Q1	Q2	Q3	Q4	Q5	Q6	Q7	Q8	Q9	Q10
Q1	1.00	0.62	0.55	0.51	0.42	0.42	0.34	0.45	0.52	0.52
Q2	0.62	1.00	0.54	0.50	0.43	0.43	0.36	0.46	0.55	0.52
Q3	0.55	0.54	1.00	0.67	0.62	0.49	0.40	0.45	0.49	0.55
Q4	0.51	0.50	0.67	1.00	0.55	0.41	0.34	0.41	0.55	0.47
Q5	0.42	0.43	0.62	0.55	1.00	0.58	0.42	0.41	0.49	0.54
Q6	0.42	0.43	0.49	0.41	0.58	1.00	0.50	0.55	0.45	0.58
Q7	0.34	0.36	0.40	0.34	0.42	0.50	1.00	0.42	0.38	0.42
Q8	0.45	0.46	0.45	0.41	0.41	0.55	0.42	1.00	0.42	0.46
Q9	0.52	0.55	0.49	0.55	0.49	0.45	0.38	0.42	1.00	0.63
Q10	0.52	0.52	0.55	0.47	0.54	0.58	0.42	0.46	0.63	1.00

Per-item descriptives

Q5 · Likert (5-point)

I feel recognized when I do good work.

312

Mean

3.71

0.92

% top-2

61%

Q7 · Likert (5-point)

My workload is sustainable week to week.

312

Mean

3.42

0.98

% top-2

52%

Q11 · Open-ended · AI theme extraction

What is one thing you would change about working here right now?

Staffing thinness and meeting load · 64 mentions

"We are stretched thin and the meeting calendar makes it hard to actually do the work. I am tired in a way I was not six months ago."

Clearer career paths · 41 mentions

"I love what I do, but I cannot tell what 'next' looks like here. A clearer ladder would help."

Recognition cadence · 33 mentions

"My manager is great in our 1:1s, but the wider team does not really hear about the wins."

Cross-team coordination · 22 mentions

"Engineering and CS often have different views on what we promised the customer. Aligning earlier would save a lot."

Positive (no change suggested) · 48 mentions

"Honestly, this is the best place I have worked. Keep doing what you are doing."

Recommended next steps

Fix First (next 90 days):

Build a recognition cadence at the team level. The Q5 mean lags the rest of the survey by half a point; the open-ended theme matches.
Publish a growth pathway for each function. The Q6 gap on Engineering vs Customer Success suggests one team already has implicit clarity the other does not.
Audit meeting load and on-call. Workload (Q7) is the lowest item and the staffing-thinness theme has the largest mention count.

Protect: mission belief, team belonging, and manager respect are all above 4.15 with strong dimension reliability. Hold these surfaces steady through the changes above.

Methodology notes

Cronbach's alpha is the standardized form. McDonald's omega is the omega-total estimate with a parametric bootstrap 95% CI from 1000 resamples. KMO (Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin) is computed from the anti-image correlation matrix. All 10 items are positively worded; no reverse-scoring was applied. Eight responses were dropped from reliability calculations because they were missing one or more Likert items.

Department comparison uses the unweighted item-level mean. The composite is the average across all 10 items per respondent, then averaged within department. K-anonymity is enforced at a floor of 5; three smaller departments did not appear in any group rollup. Cohen's d on the composite was computed against the pooled SD.

Key driver analysis uses standardized multiple regression on the overall-engagement item with all 10 items as predictors. Confidence intervals are at 95%. The Action Priority Map quadrants use the median importance and the median mean as the split lines.