Recognise This! – Don’t bother to survey employees on their engagement unless you’re willing to invest time and money to resolve difficult, deep, cultural challenges their answers may bring to light.
Sometimes, we need to air our HR dirty laundry. Let’s bring into the light of day how surveys are traditionally conducted and then acted upon. Indeed, let’s stop torturing our employees with bad surveys – especially bad employee engagement surveys.
Frankly, the survey itself is rarely the problem. The questions are usually quite good in terms of defining the information you and the organisation want to learn about employee attitudes, satisfaction and engagement. Let’s look at the three most common failures of employee surveys as typically implemented today:
1) Post Survey Actions/Reactions Only Serve to Further Disengage
If you’re going to ask employees to take the time to answer your survey, then you better show them you listened by takingappropriate action. Take, for example, this story from Lead Change Group of an employee disgruntled by a poorly executed survey :
“They did ask some good questions and we shared how to make things better, but they ignored all those issues, and made us spend extra time on task forces to address cosmetics and desk arrangements. Our reward for taking time to give them good feedback that would improve efficiency and profitability – was to be ignored and given extra work on how we would decorate the department… This is so stupid! We were ignored and punished…and we really tried to help.”
Sure, it’s easier to resolve the “cosmetic” issues than tackle the deeper, cultural aspects. But if you aren’t willing to honestly look at your organisation and commit the resources to address the challenges your employees bring forward, don’t bother to survey them in the first place.
2) Most Disengaged Don’t Bother to Respond to the Survey
A colleague of mine shared her story of disengagement at her last place of employment:
“I was so disengaged and disgusted with the company that I didn’t even bother to respond to the engagement survey – nor did most of my teammates. Besides, we knew they wouldn’t take action on the survey results anyway, so why bother? We’d all laugh (snicker is more like it) when leadership would talk about engagement numbers because we all knew the most disengaged weren’t even taking the survey, thereby dramatically overstating engagement levels.”
Your engagement results may actually be worse than you think, especially if you routinely don’t react appropriately to what the employees are telling you through the survey.
3) Bad Survey Timing, Especially Waiting to Survey on Engagement until the Exit Interview
Our semi-annual employer survey with SHRM regularly shows that the exit interview is the second most common way companies survey employee engagement. The obvious issue is it’s far too late to do anything at that point in time. Or, asBarbara Milhizer put it in TLNT:
“As an employee, I’m wondering why no one bothered to ask me these questions over the past 18 years? It’s a little insulting to be asked why I’m leaving for the sake of good data and action planning. Is the implication that I was expendable, but heaven forbid anyone else ever fall victim to a bad manager and lack of recognition?”
The Bottom Line – Don’t bother to survey employees on engagement unless you’re willing to take their feedback, honestly evaluate what they are telling you, and take steps to resolve perhaps deep cultural issues. If you’re not willing to make that investment of time and finances up front, you will only serve to further disengage and disgruntle employees.
How does your organisation take action on employee survey results?
