Why Employee Engagement Surveys Suck

Survey Question

Last year I was asked to talk to the board of a small company (employing approx 250 people all under one roof) about employee engagement. Turns out they were interested in starting an employee survey and wanted some thoughts on this. I said ‘give me an hour to put something together’ and came up with this.

Why do employee surveys suck

They decided not to bother with a survey and we did some interesting work together. I guess what I learned from this is that sometimes you just need to go with what you believe. I mean, it would have been easy for me to share these thoughts and finish with ‘but we can avoid all these things and still give you a great survey’. I could have told them what they thought they wanted to hear, and that would have sucked even more.

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Author: Doug Shaw

Artist and Consultant. Embracing uncertainty, sketching myself into existence. Helping people do things differently, through an artistic lens.

8 thoughts on “Why Employee Engagement Surveys Suck”

  1. Plus from my experience, people moan about all the same stuff. They’re not paid enough, they’d like to be paid more. They state that personally they’re great at doing their job, but in another question they say that they don’t get enough training.

    And then like you say, what comes out of it? Nowt.

  2. The mistake that a lot of companies make is surveying the heck out of staff and never acting on the results. While you can get away with it once, maybe even twice, engagement and interest plummets when no action is taken. If companies are going to ask employees to invest time in a survey then the employer needs to be willing to take action. Great post!

  3. I had a similar experience with a government agency who wanted to spend a load of money getting people to ‘vent’. I did eventually persuade them that they were wasting their money, since they were hoping to come out with an excellence award.

  4. Hey Doug… dissenter in the ranks 🙂

    (I create/run surveys for a living)

    I am willing to bet that this small company would have done alright if they had pursued an employee engagement survey because the Board were genuine about their engagement. It’s what happens after the survey that really matters – sharing results/findings, following up, etc.

    An employee survey is not employee engagement (which was another conversation I took part in on LinkedIn:
    http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Employee-Survey-Is-Not-Employee-1787589.S.102643980?qid=e6d93e77-9fb2-4a99-b360-36d135afb1f2&trk=group_items_see_more-0-b-cmr ) but they are popular initiatives for encouraging engagement because they are inexpensive, easy to reach all staff, and effective.

    A good survey, with all its planning and communications, can kick-start conversations, create focus-groups (before and after) and encourage communication.

  5. @Brad – exactly!

    Questions about salary/benefits are often low scoring but if you have even lower scores for say, having the right tools to do your job – this is surely telling you something! (that’s not a reason to ask questions you already know the answer to – I think asking about reward/benefits is mostly only useful compared with other questions about workload)

  6. I agree with you, Doug, and for sure a firm with just 250 people should not seem to need a survey. Dialogue would serve everyone better.

    But I am also guided by evidence I hope, so I note that 98% of Hays 2010 “Most Admired Companies in the World” claim to survey their employees. I don’t know if that correlation is chance, causative or even if they succeed despite surveying, but It makes me wonder whether surveying may help the best big companies – when the results lead to meaningful, relevant action.

  7. @jonathan….. meaningful, relevant action for who? What the employee wants is generally different to what the company ends up focussing on. So “I want better remuneration” leads to “look at all the great extra benefits you get and have a new coffee machine”.

    @Brad – spot on – absolutely agree.

    Personally, I am sick to death of surveys to “check how our employees are feeling about things”. They are a waste of my time, minor changes are intoduced to grab a headline and the big issues get pushed to the back through a “requiring more analysis” approach which kicks it into the long grass.

  8. The problem is that ‘one’ approach is never right for all organisations. A company of 250 can quite happily run enough focus groups to gauge the opinion of their employees, however you scale that up to national and international organisations with thousands of employees and it becomes prohibitively expensive. What would you recommend, other than a survey, here?

    I think a good approach is to run representative focus groups to dictate the survey questions, again, no off the shelf set of questions is going to be right, so ask the employees/managers what they think the right questions are and ask them. That way you’re still covering all of your staff but with staff-driven content.

    @Chris, I also think that having a clear definition of ‘engagement’ is the starting block for all companies. Why do you want to engage your staff? What’s the aim? A lot of people still see engagement as either staff satisfaction or a forcible programme to get more from your employees. I think, as usual, the truth is somewhere in between. We all know happy employees work harder, businesses want this, but they want it channelled in the right way (no one wants happy, unproductive employees). So engagement should be about gaining your employees’ discretionary effort by providing them with the conditions they need to do their jobs effectively (gaining being a very important word there).

    My final point, is, like everyone else is saying, if you do ask your staff for their opinions, do something with it! Lack of action of the back of a survey is worse than not having done it at all, sincerity is key in the whole process.

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