University of Miami Increases Engagement Index from 82% to 86.4% and Survey Participation from 74% to 86% Through "Powered by You" Program
- Survey participation increased from 74% (2023) to 80% (2024) to 86% (2025)
- Engagement Index improved from 82.0% (2023) to 83.3% (2024) to 86.4% (2025)
- Three-tier action strategy embedded engagement accountability from enterprise leadership to individual goals
When CEOs talk about cultural compatibility during mergers, it can often be overstated. There are invariably going to be differences in cultures, regardless of similarity.
What Was the Opportunity?
The University of Miami faced an engagement challenge shaped by workforce complexity, pandemic after-effects, and eroded trust in how faculty and staff voices were heard.
As an institution spanning education, research and patient care, employees experience work very differently — a clinical nurse, a tenured professor, and a research scientist share the mission to transform lives but have vastly different daily realities. While retention and pride in the mission remained strong, early listening data and qualitative feedback revealed consistent opportunities for improvement: leadership communication, clarity of direction, belonging, and recognition all surfaced as areas where faculty and staff questioned whether leadership genuinely understood their day-to-day experience.
Compounding this was the absence of a consistent, enterprise-wide approach to engagement. Prior survey efforts were intermittent, which limited trend data and reduced confidence that feedback would lead to action. Leaders lacked a shared framework to understand engagement across units, and faculty and staff were unsure whether speaking up would result in meaningful change.
This mattered because how the University cares for its people directly shapes how it serves students, patients and the broader community.
What Was the Solution?
The University launched the Powered by You Comprehensive Engagement Program, designed not as a one-time survey, but as an ongoing commitment embedded in how the institution leads and operates.
The program introduced a consistent listening cadence that established baseline data and enabled trend tracking over time. This created a shared understanding of the faculty and staff experience across the institution and allowed leaders to focus on a small number of shared priorities rather than broad or disconnected efforts.
To ensure insight translated into meaningful action, the University implemented a three-tiered accountability structure:
- Enterprise-level action plans align senior leaders around institution-wide priorities informed by engagement trends, ensuring that systemic issues received coordinated, systemic solutions.
- Team-level action plans require leaders to review results with their teams, engage in dialogue about local context, and commit to focused, achievable actions within their control. This placed accountability where culture is experienced every day — at the manager level.
- Individual engagement goals integrate into the performance management cycle, reinforcing that engagement is shaped by daily behaviors and decisions, not just annual initiatives.
Transparency and follow-through were central to rebuilding trust. Leaders at every level were expected to communicate results openly, listen with intention, and demonstrate sustained action over time.
What Was the Impact?
Powered by You was designed to drive sustained progress rather than produce instant results, and the outcomes reflect that approach.
Participation rebuilt trust in the process. Response rates increased steadily as faculty and staff experienced continuous listening and saw that their feedback led to visible action:
- 2023: 74%
- 2024: 80%
- 2025: 86%
Engagement improved in meaningful ways. The Engagement Index rose in each year of the program:
- 2023: 82.0%
- 2024: 83.3%
- 2025: 86.4%
While progress varied across units and employee groups, the trend data reinforced an important lesson: sustained focus on a small number of shared priorities drives greater impact than one-time or overly broad efforts.
Cultural shifts took hold. Leaders grew more comfortable acknowledging opportunities for improvement and engaging their teams in open, constructive dialogue. Faculty and staff increasingly saw engagement as a shared responsibility rather than a survey result. Embedding individual engagement goals into the performance management cycle moved accountability from intention to daily practice.
Powered by You continues to evolve. Through this comprehensive engagement program, the University has strengthened trust, demonstrated care for faculty and staff, and built a strong foundation for engagement that advances its mission to transform lives.
By employing a listening strategy and leveraging a platform that gives you objective data, it’s invaluable to informing your people strategy,” says Miller.
The Impact
Improvements in employee engagement, retention, and leadership support
The employee listening strategy delivered significant benefits:
Discovery of Engagement Hotspots: The data revealed previously unanticipated issues across different business units that leadership had assumed would be more insulated from M&A activity. “We thought our people challenges, such as retention, were only in our wholesale banks, but the reality is they were in our frontline and branches as well,” notes Miller. This insight allowed for more targeted action planning and interventions.
Identification of Cultural Misalignments: The surveys exposed important differences in how each organization interpreted the bank’s core values. While both banks considered themselves people-centric, their practical approaches differed significantly. “[Some of the people from American National Bank] perceived us to be more process-oriented... they really didn’t understand why we had all these ‘hoops’ to jump through,” explains Miller. “They saw that as an example of, ‘Hey, we can be flexible and nimble when we need to service a customer.’ But for us, it was like, ‘Wow, that’s a really risky proposition.’ We leveraged the data and insights to then go and have conversations with those leaders and action plan around it.” Subsequent surveying showed that this “values gap” had indeed narrowed.
Acceleration of Technology Investments: Insights from the survey revealed significant technology gaps that negatively impacted productivity and employee experience. For example, American National Bank, the acquired institution, had implemented innovative tools like DocuSign to streamline loan administration. However, these capabilities were lost during the transition to Atlantic Union Bank, creating frustration among employees. “For your job to be easy, and then to come to Atlantic Union Bank and have the thing that makes it easy go away... that degrades the experience all the more,” explains Miller. This degradation in the employee experience also risked reduced productivity and retention.
Recognizing this as an acute pain point, Atlantic Union Bank acted swiftly. They worked cross-functionally with their technology and operations teams to reprioritize the DocuSign project within their existing roadmap. This decision was driven by the understanding that reinstating such tools was essential for retaining talent and improving engagement. The initiative had a meaningful impact on teammate work experience, engagement, and retention. “The most powerful thing we heard is, ‘You listened. You leveraged this information and did something with it. That reaffirmed the commitment to the combined organization and retention in the long term,’” says Miller.
Expansion of Leadership Visibility: Listening data showed that new markets without an existing Atlantic Union leadership presence struggled more during the transition. “It felt like the blind were leading the blind,” says Miller. This led to a strategic change in their integration approach, ensuring the physical presence and accessibility of legacy leadership in new markets.
Lessons for the Future
Improvements in employee engagement, retention, and leadership support
The insights gained have now become part of Atlantic Union Bank’s M&A playbook, directly informing their approach to future growth. “The lessons learned from our listening strategy have literally been written into our playbook for future state M&A,” Miller explains.
The impact extends beyond immediate integration concerns. The data now informs executive goal-setting and accountability measures as well, with leaders being evaluated on their contribution to successful integration outcomes. “Senior and executive leadership has a responsibility to support the success of the integration,” says Miller. “Thanks to Perceptyx’s platform, we can measure engagement, where we see hotspots, where we’re seeing risk to retention, and where we’re seeing far-reaching positive impacts.”
Senior and executive leadership has a responsibility to support the success of the integration,” says Miller. “Thanks to Perceptyx’s platform, we can measure engagement, where we see hotspots, where we’re seeing risk to retention, and where we’re seeing far-reaching positive impacts.
Looking ahead, Atlantic Union Bank continues to refine its employee listening strategy, particularly as it manages the challenges of back-to-back acquisitions. “Merger fatigue is real,” acknowledges Miller. “We have to prioritize our investment in time to ensure that we are not losing momentum around teammate engagement and actioning on the insights we had, amid a lot of different distractions. In the instance of back-to-back mergers, we have to be mindful of the future integration but also continue attending to the teammates who have joined in the not-so-distant past.”
Objective data has been instrumental in helping the company interpret feedback and insights, explains Miller: “It is imperative to run pulse surveys during a merger and respond to that data before going into the next merger.” This approach provides valuable lessons learned as they prepare for their next acquisition. Another focus area for Atlantic Union Bank moving forward is leveraging features that support action planning: “[Perceptyx has] made [action planning] so easy, it’s so seamless.”