What a poor staff survey may reveal about behavioural leakage.
People were disappointed, although perhaps not entirely surprised. Meetings were arranged, findings discussed and attention turned to what the team could do to improve its scores next time.
The survey had not uncovered something that had suddenly gone wrong, but it had made visible what had been accumulating for some time.
People had experienced recurring behaviour from managers that left them feeling unheard, controlled, insufficiently supported or unable to contribute fully. Some had tried to adapt, some had become quieter, others had begun looking for work elsewhere. The clearest messages appeared in exit surveys, after people had already decided to leave.
By then, the organisation was dealing with much more than a disappointing survey result. Vacancies had to be filled and recruitment took both time and money. New colleagues needed extensive training before they could contribute fully, and when recruitment was restricted, the remaining work had to be shared between fewer people.
As pressure increased morale and motivation fell. Sickness rose, and both the amount and quality of the work came under strain.
Each consequence appeared in a different place. The exit data sat with HR, recruitment and training needs appeared in budgets and workforce plans. Absence had its own figures, whilst workload and quality problems showed up elsewhere again.
The connection between them was easy to miss...
There was no single invoice marked 'ineffective behaviour', but the organisation was still paying a substantial price.
A poor staff survey can feel like the beginning of a problem because it is the moment the problem receives formal attention, but more often, it is a late indicator. It tells us how people experienced the organisation during the months before they completed it. Exit interviews arrive even later still: they capture the voice of someone whose decision may already be irreversible.
If we begin only with the result, the response can become narrowly focused on simply improving the next score. We may create an action plan, adjust a process or ask managers to attend another program, and whilst those steps may be useful, they do not necessarily reveal how the situation developed or why earlier signals did not lead to meaningful change.
The more searching question is not simply, ‘How do we improve the survey result?’
It is, ‘What has been happening here, for how long, and what has it already cost?’
Imagine being responsible for a large building and receiving an enormous water bill. Somewhere, water is escaping, but there is no obvious flood and no single broken pipe in view. You can see the cost, but what you cannot yet see is where the leak began or how it has travelled through the system.
Something similar happens in organisations, but the resources being lost are time, attention, capability and energy.
We call this behavioural leakage: the recurring loss or diversion of organisational capacity through patterns of behaviour that do not sufficiently benefit anybody and divert time, energy and resources away from what the organisation needs to achieve.
Tracing the leak backwards might take us from sickness and overwork to an unfilled vacancy > from the vacancy to a resignation > from the resignation to repeated experiences of being managed in ways that diminished trust or agency > from those experiences to concerns that were not voiced, not heard or not acted upon, but this does not necessarily lead us to one obvious point where everything went wrong...
There may not be one dramatic incident.
Leakage often accumulates through ordinary moments: managers who take over rather than enabling others; concerns raised met with defensiveness, decisions revisited because the authority is unclear, difficult conversations frequently postponed, compliance whilst withdrawing ideas, initiative or energy, or colleagues compensating for a pattern they no longer expect to change.
One moment may cost little, but repetition changes the picture. Human, relational, organisational and financial costs begin to reinforce one another.
Workplace conflict gives us an indication of how widely these costs can spread. Acas research published in 2021, using 2018–2019 data, estimated that conflict cost UK employers £28.5 billion a year - just over £1,000 for every employee. The estimate included resignation, dismissal, sickness absence, formal procedures and management time.
CIPD’s Good Work Index 2024 found that one in four UK employees had experienced workplace conflict during the preceding year. Among those employees, 33% intended to leave within the following 12 months, compared with 16% of employees who had not experienced conflict.
These national findings do not tell an individual organisation what its own behavioural bill will be, nor do they show that behaviour is the only cause of absence, turnover or poor performance, but they do make the case for looking upstream.
By the time a situation becomes a grievance, resignation or formal case, how much has already been spent in attention, confidence, cooperation and management time?
And what happens next?
One person’s departure can increase the pressure on everyone else that stays, increasing the likeliness of reactive behaviour, creating further strain and another round of leakage.
If the leak is left undetected the organisation can find itself paying repeatedly for a pattern it has not yet learned to recognise.
It is tempting to reduce this story to a familiar phrase: people leave managers.
Sometimes their experience of a manager is central to the decision, however, stopping there would simply locate the problem in one person and leave the wider organisational reality unexplored.
When a pipe leaks, blaming the water does not help. Instead, we inspect the whole system.
Behaviour also develops within certain conditions: structures, relationships, histories, workloads, expectations and patterns of power. Those conditions do not remove individual responsibility, but they do influence which behaviour becomes possible, usual and tolerated.
A useful inquiry therefore holds two realities together:
What are people doing, and what in the wider system may be inviting, reinforcing or failing to interrupt that behaviour?
Functional Fluency offers a shared, non-blaming language for having that inquiry. It focuses on observable behaviour and its effect rather than labelling people or fixing them into types. It helps us recognise how we are using our energy, notice our reactive patterns and expand the range of responses available to us.
This matters, because people rarely arrive at work with the intention of creating a leak.
Some managers may believe that taking control is the quickest way to protect standards, some colleagues may keep quiet to preserve harmony, and someone may repeatedly step in to help, without noticing that others are becoming less responsible as a result.
The intention may be understandable, but the effect remains costly.
Two questions sit at the heart of Functional Fluency:
Do I and others benefit?
Are we achieving what matters most?
They invite us to examine impact as well as intention and to consider the purpose, the people involved and the wider system.
The real test comes before the next staff survey: in the pressurised meeting, the unclear decision, the moment of disagreement or the conversation we would rather postpone.
Can we assess what is actually happening?
Can we notice our first reaction without automatically acting from it?
Can we choose behaviour that is proportionate to the situation and useful for the work and the people involved?
Staff and exit interviews have value. They provide evidence, reveal patterns and give people a route to say what employees may not have said elsewhere. The danger lies in treating them as the first point at which the organisation could have known.
Earlier signals are often present: the same decision returning to the agenda, fewer people contributing in meetings, managers carrying responsibilities that belong elsewhere, small tensions becoming normal, new ideas drying up, or capable people disengaging or teams quietly arranging themselves around someone’s behaviour.
The task is to become curious about those signals while there is still room to respond.
Where is the behavioural bill already visible?
Which patterns may be contributing to it?
What organisational conditions need attention?
Who is affected?
What would become possible if people had more effective choices?
The next staff survey may tell us whether people’s perceptions have changed. It will never capture every hour, idea, relationship or piece of confidence lost while the pattern was developing.
The more useful question begins much earlier: where is behaviour quietly creating a bill in our organisation - and what could we still change before it arrives somewhere else?
Leona
Sources:
Acas (2021), Estimating the costs of workplace conflict. Research based on 2018–2019 data.
CIPD (2024), Good Work Index findings on workplace conflict
The illustrated image attached below shows how what appears in a staff survey can be part of a much wider cycle of behaviour, consequences and organisational conditions.