There is a frequently used quote about employee surveys that goes like this: “An employee survey is like a hand grenade. Once you pull the pin you have to do something with it. Otherwise, it may harm you rather than help you.” (Viteles, 1953).
I used to think this quote was rather clever. But after having spent ten long years running employee surveys both client and agency side, I’ve changed my mind. The cold reality is that no matter how well designed the survey, or how much senior management are motivated to act on the results – the traditional employee survey is largely a waste of time and money. It’s my belief that organisations succeed in increasing the engagement of their people in spite of employee surveys, not because of them.
The difficulty with surveys is that they promise far more than they can ever deliver.
On the whole, I don’t blame managers and leaders for a lack of action – the results don’t really provide them with much direction. Most organisations wrongly assume that their managers will be able to conjure up a brilliant action plan solely based on hazy scores from a survey designed to bolster their provider’s benchmarking database and consisting of the world’s most boring and overused question format – the dreaded Agree/Disagree Likert Scale.
So it’s no wonder that once your whizzy multi-variate analysis has established the ‘key drivers’ of engagement, once you’ve drawn some vague and obvious conclusions about the need to ‘increase trust in leadership’ or ‘make people feel valued,’ that you say, “Right, better do some more research – focus groups anyone?” Surveys comprised of tick boxes cannot provide detail. Without detail, there can be no action.
Employee surveys are typically designed as a measurement tool, as opposed to a diagnostic tool. Part of the problem is the reluctance of organisations to either ask, or adequately analyse, open-ended text questions. Despite tremendous advances in text analytics, most organisations are awful at analysing unstructured text data.
Aside from surveys moving from paper to online and questionnaires becoming more standardized and boring, nothing has really changed since they were developed in the 1920s. However, digital technology and social media are providing much better ways of generating insight from people. We are on the cusp of a real paradigm shift in employee research – it’s becoming more social. The whole premise of people plodding through surveys in isolation is becoming outdated. Clever organisations are learning to harness the wisdom of crowds and then distil the essence of that wisdom.
Of course, there will be plenty of pitfalls to avoid, and challenges to overcome, as these developments become more widespread. It’s just such a shame that many organisations will continue using an approach that is 90 years old to generate bland feedback and disengage their people.
This is an interesting perspective on employee attitude surveys!
I have done 2 surveys in the last 4 years and both have been qualitatitive and given the management team, very useful feedback in a structured way. I love the idea of using other media to do the same work…what specific approaches do you suggest to harness the wisdom and distilll the essence. Practical suggestions please.
Timely indeed! I do know that the pitfalls are there and, i will confess that i don’t know what they are but it is time we moved on from EE surveys. Organisations are scared to embrace social media because of the lack of control, but trusting their employees is perhaps the starting point.
I recognise all the drawbacks that Michael mentions, and it’s the second time in as many months that I’ve heard it said that a better way is via social media. The first was from Ed Cochrane of Edinburgh University Business School/Emotional Sciences and Bizmunky.com I’ve still got to get my head around this, and look forward to a lively reaction on both sides to Michael’s article
Michael is absolutely correct in his analysis. How many organisations undertake these surveys, and yet nothing changes as a result! Few ask the right questions (the ones the employees really want to be asked and provide their views upon), the action plans usually take up a lot of time and effort without changing anything substantially, and engagement is not done via a survey! What a waste of time and money!
I have never seen a coherent argument in support of a poorly designed survey that lacks focus, confuses participants and managers, and leads to little or no change. These types of survey should surely be consigned to the scrap heap.
However I have also never seen a coherent argument against a well designed survey that forms part of an overall engagement strategy and that leads to meaningful change. The clients that we work with by and large take surveys seriously and do something useful with the insights gleaned.
In fact one of the consistent findings in our research is that the question “I believe that action will be taken in response to this survey” is almost always very highly correlated with actual levels of engagement in our client organisation.
Michael, you’re absolutely right and wrong!
Most engagement surveys offer a process that is virtually unchanged from the old paper and pen days. Worse; it is centered on the macro information needs of top management. It’s an organizational engagement meter.
The focus should be on developing local prescriptions and a process for locally turning these into actions. One proof that this local process works is the results of our clients; they have an increasing results year after year.
Hi, thanks for your comments – you can now read the second half of this blog about what all this looks like in practice, and try it for yourself at:
http://hybridwisdom.com/silvermanresearch
Thanks for your evaluation Michael. Always nice to hear from someone who has been actively involved in surveys for so many years.
I turned around several different management disasters by creating engaged employees and developed a script for doing it. The centerpiece of that script was to talk with employees to find out what they needed to do a better job and then provide it to them. I never used a survey and could never understand why anyone would survey people they were talking with enough to meet their needs.
Best regards, Ben