Manager Trend Best Practices

Perceptyx recommends that employee survey trends follow the manager–employee relationship within the organizational hierarchy rather than the team label. This approach reflects how employees experience their day-to-day work environment and provides continuity in how survey results are interpreted over time. While improvement is a shared responsibility across employees, leaders, and the organization, aligning trends to the manager relationship ensures feedback remains coherent, fair, and usable as teams evolve and leadership changes. 

1. Trend should align with where action occurs

Employee surveys are designed to support improvement through the combined efforts of leaders, teams, and the broader organization. Managers play an important role in shaping the conditions for improvement such as setting expectations, providing feedback, and reinforcing priorities. When leadership changes, those conditions often change as well. Trending by manager keeps feedback aligned to a consistent leadership context and preserves the connection between feedback, behavior, and outcomes.

2. Trends require continuity 

For trends to be meaningful, there must be reasonable continuity in measurement and group composition. In employee surveys, that experience is the day-to-day work environment, with leadership as a central influence. When leadership changes but the team name stays the same, the context for employees also changes. Score shifts may reflect this leadership change rather than a gradual evolution of the same environment. Trending by manager helps maintain clarity in how changes are interpreted over time.

3. Teams change; leadership shapes the work environment

Teams frequently change due to reorgs, renaming, matrix reporting, and natural evolution, making them unstable units for longitudinal analysis. Leadership, by contrast, shapes how work gets done, what behaviors are expected and rewarded, and how norms and standards are reinforced. Manager–employee relationships better reflect how employees experience the organization and where change can realistically occur. Using manager and employee IDs also reduces reporting exceptions, lowers support burden, and aligns more cleanly with talent processes.

4. Reduces misinterpretation and fairness concerns

When trends follow the team, new managers may inherit historical results they did not influence. This can lead to attribution errors, where leaders are praised or blamed for conditions they did not create. Trending by manager keeps interpretation focused on the leadership context in which the feedback was generated, improving perceived fairness, accuracy, and trust in the data.

5. Supports confidentiality and access controls

Manager-based trending allows for consistent confidentiality protections. It avoids situations where new leaders gain access to results that were tied to a prior leader’s population and should remain confidential.

Conclusion

Perceptyx trends survey results by manager because leadership is the most stable, influential, and actionable unit of employee experience. This approach produces trends that are fair, interpretable, confidential, and useful for driving real change. This provides a consistent, scalable approach for leaders, and additional demographic reporting with trend comparisons can be leveraged to support additional analysis.