How Angel Trains moved beyond the annual survey to a smarter way of listening
After more than 15 years working with Effectory, Angel Trains has built a workplace where employees trust that feedback leads to action. Now, the company is evolving from a single annual survey to a smarter listening approach: one comprehensive survey every two years, supported by shorter pulses in between. The goal is to understand employee experiences in greater depth, respond faster to emerging issues and keep improving over time.
Angel Trains is a major investor in the British rail industry, supporting the UK’s passenger rail network through investment in rolling stock, refurbishment, maintenance and technical development. With around 160 employees, the company believes in continuous improvement, with a focus on fine-tuning and forward momentum. For more than a decade, employee feedback has helped the company identify opportunities to improve and strengthen its culture.
More than 15 years of working with Effectory has helped Angel Trains build a strong and stable Engagement score, along with a culture where employees trusted that feedback would lead to action. Throughout that time, the annual engagement survey served as the primary way of understanding the employee experience.
But paradoxically, that very success is what made the annual survey, on its own, less valuable than it once was:
“After 15 years of working with Effectory, our results had improved year on year for most of those years. But now, in the main survey, results might go up 0.1 or down 0.1; they’re relatively static at a high level. That means the value of getting that data annually is lower.” Andrew McManus, Head of Human Resources & Organization Development, Angel Trains
The annual survey still mattered but many of the most valuable insights were increasingly found elsewhere: in employees’ open comments and in topics that required deeper exploration. Topics such as wellbeing, psychological safety and emerging questions around AI are too important to wait another year for answers.
“I’d love to find a way to really understand what’s happening in our culture beneath the surface — things we sense but haven’t yet been able to see properly with our current approach.” — Andrew Limb
Rather than running one large survey every year, Angel Trains is moving to a comprehensive survey every two years, supported by shorter pulses in between. The goal isn’t to collect more feedback. It’s to ask better questions at the right time.
“The beauty of this approach, from my perspective, is that it enables us to be more responsive to the data we get from our main engagement survey, which always throws up really useful insights about what’s working really well in our culture and what we can continue to improve.” — Andrew McManus
Shorter pulses allow the company to explore survey findings in greater depth and respond more quickly to emerging concerns.
“More frequent, lighter pulses enable us to get more specificity and more insight about the issues that seem to be of most leverage and most relevance to our culture.” — Andrew McManus
They also create opportunities to continue the conversation when important themes emerge, rather than waiting until the next survey cycle.
“Going back to the company and saying, ‘Here are these three areas — tell us more,’ demonstrates that we’re interested, responding and intending to act.” — Andrew Limb
While Angel Trains has maintained exceptionally strong employee scores for many years, it has continued to make measurable progress. Between 2021 and 2026, Employer Excellence increased from 8.1 to 8.6, while Engagement rose from 8.4 to 8.7. During the same period, employee perceptions improved across all five core company values: Always Accountable, Problem Solvers, Together Better, People People and Future Forward.
One practice that has remained consistent is closing the feedback loop. Employees see what happens after they share feedback. Results are shared openly, priorities are discussed and people can see how the organization actively responds.
“People are used to — and trust — that when they’re asked to fill in a survey, it’s worth their time. We have a 15-year history of asking these questions, presenting back what we’ve heard, setting out how we plan to respond and then playing back how we have actually responded.” — Andrew McManus
Continuous listening allows Angel Trains to explore issues while they are still fresh in people’s minds, giving leaders a clearer view of where support or action is needed.
For Andrew, success ultimately comes down to whether people feel safe enough to be honest.
“The headline for me is that I hope it will further increase engagement — the sense that, as a company, we genuinely want people to feel psychologically safe enough to give us honest answers. And that we, whoever ‘we the company’ is, are genuinely keen to understand the experience of work that everyone has and are truly trying every day to make it better.” — Andrew McManus
Angel Trains has been recognized multiple times as a World-class Workplace. For the company, the recognition matters because it reflects the experiences of employees themselves.
“There’s something about having expert, third-party accreditation that says your people genuinely think this is a great workplace.” — Andrew McManus
The value of employee listening now reaches beyond HR. Shareholders view engagement data as an indicator of future performance, while leaders use it to understand where support and attention are needed more immediately.
That is why Angel Trains sees continuous listening not as a replacement for what already works but as the next step in a journey that began more than 15 years ago.
