Your Engagement Survey Is Measuring the Wrong Thing with Dustin Snyder

Most leaders treat problem behavior at work as a people problem. Dustin Snyder treats it as a design problem.

Dustin came up through HR, then took both the VP of HR and president seats at a 600-employee manufacturing division that had been losing money for years. The turnaround taught him something uncomfortable. The HR toolkit he had been trained on, including progressive discipline, was built to limit liability, not to change behavior. That led him to human systems theory, the finding that behavior at scale is a rational adaptation to the environment. If people don't change when you ask them to, it's because the environment hasn't changed.

In this conversation, Brandon and Dustin get into why engagement surveys return symptoms instead of root causes, the UPS survey that hit record scores a few months before a companywide strike, the skilled trades team that was quitting over pride rather than pay, and the rural energy company that was hiding the exact thing its best candidates wanted.

If absenteeism, turnover, or disengagement keeps coming back no matter what you try, this one gives you a different place to look.

About our guest

Dustin Snyder is a consultant and the author of Sink or Swim: The Human Systems Theory Approach to Business Performance, the first of three planned books. He spent his career in HR before taking on both the VP of HR and president roles at the American division of a global metals company, roughly 600 employees and $300 million in annual revenue. That turnaround became the basis for SWIM, short for strategic workforce insight mapping, the process he now uses to trace systemic employee behavior back to its root causes. He has worked with manufacturers, hospitals, software companies, and higher education.

TIMESTAMPS

01:45 Why the goals were never the problem 03:55 How a losing manufacturing division changed his management style 05:20 Why the HR toolkit limits liability instead of changing behavior 06:35 How stricter attendance policies produce worse attendance 11:30 What human systems theory means in plain language 12:45 Why engagement surveys hand you symptoms instead of root causes 14:20 How UPS hit record engagement scores right before a strike 15:45 Why a skilled trades team was quitting over pride, not pay 17:35 Why most consulting engagements fade the moment the invoice clears 23:35 How triangulation spreads dysfunction through an organization 26:15 What a top performer really costs when they leave 28:45 What leadership