Last week we talked about how we’re largely underutilizing (or sometimes misusing) engagement surveys. We’ve lost our way a bit. Although we started off with great intentions, our process and post-survey work often fall short of our best hopes such as:

• to elevate the employee experience
• to increase retention
• to elevate trust
• to give enable focused continuous improvement

They cost a lot of money. They take a lot of time. And everything surrounding your survey – from the questions you ask to the way it’s launched to your follow up – is a reflection of the current climate and even of your overall culture. And it can be worth it. This post is about ensuring it is.

(PS – fellow organizational behaviour nerds like me, you may be interested in this article on the difference been organization climate versus culture.)

A Solution-Oriented Approach to Engagement Surveys that Trust Engage

If you follow my blogs regularly, you will know I find it challenging to sit in a problem-centric place for long. Let’s talk about solutions. What is within your power to influence and implement the most effective engagement survey possible? Here’s some of my best advice (from 20 years of practice…insert “it must be Oil of Olay” commercial reference for anyone over the age of 35 ;-] )

1. Make it Mutual

If I were to ask you why you’re doing an engagement survey and you answer “because somebody is expecting us to do it” (e.g., you are legislated to do one) but you know good and well that there will be no or minimal follow-through, then match the survey with minimal effort for you and the recipient.

If your launch, communication, and/or survey is more robust than your follow-up to results, scale back the front end so it’s not quite so lopsided. Otherwise, it’s a one-sided benefit: it’s like asking someone to the prom and then deciding to go to a movie instead (without them).

2. Make it Valuable

So much is on busy middle managers’ shoulders. Asking them to tell their staff, having them nag people to complete a survey, and then emailing them a report and saying “fix it” (among 100 other competing priorities) is completely unrealistic yet often the reality. Not only do managers not want to (or can’t) do it, it’s based on the premise we used to call “competition by nagging.”

If people see that the information will be used, that the organization cares what they have to say, and (as we’ll talk about next) they have the time and resources to complete the survey, they’re more likely to do it. If it’s not seen as valuable, it’s like asking your teenager to pay you every time they clean their room.

3. Make it Accessible

We make staff jump through all kinds of hoops to fill out our surveys. Computer surveys for staff who don’t normally work at a computer or a private spot to access one. Short timelines outside of when casual staff might be at work. Only an English version when not everyone is English speaking. Not to mention, not meeting accessibility standards (such as AODA in Ontario).

Consider all the barriers to people completing the survey in advance, and work hard to combat them. One way might be to ask fewer questions (e.g., some folks use the Gallup 12). Knowing there is a barrier yet not addressing it is like expecting Siri to cook dinner for you just because you asked her to look up a recipe (Apple will probably figure out how to make this happen within a few years but for now, likely not).

It’s Your Turn

What have I forgotten here? Rockstar readers, I know you have great suggestions too:

• What additional “Make it…” tips do you have?
• Have you had success in elevating the effectiveness of employee surveys? 
• What changes have been made to increase ROE (return on effort) and/or validate ROI (return on investment)?

In the third part of our series, I’m going to dive into the employee experience as the next frontier for engagement. The train has already left the station so don’t get left behind.

In the meantime, if your employee engagement surveys have been telling you for years that you need to elevate recognition, I’ve shared all my secrets below. These are all the tools that I use to build (or rebuild) recognition programs now all in one short course (that HR folks, you’ll get continuing education credits for).

For more content on creating a great employee experience, check out these links:

• Recognition is Not Fluffy Stuff – Why Acknowledging your People is Good For Business
• Why Engagement Matters in Every Organization
• It Doesn’t Cost Much to Build a Culture of Recognition

Employee surveying started with the best of intentions. Let’s face it; there was a time when no one cared about employee safety and wellbeing let alone their opinions and experience. As the saying goes, we’ve come a long way baby.

That said, it’s time to do our own pulse check about how effective engagement surveys are today.

More on this in my VLOG: 5 Ways to Boost Recognition Scores: The Easiest Employee Engagement Metric to Impact Before Your Next Survey

Why We Need to “Take The Pulse”

We need to keep the pulse of how our people are doing. As organizations continue to grow – in locations, in size, across the globe even – it is virtually impossible to keep our fingers on the pulse. Engagement surveys provide a mechanism to gauge, in a comparable way, how people experience their work that transcends (as much as possible) work variables. 

We also need a mechanism to check in about what roadblocks stand in the way of people doing their job – equipment, supplies, development opportunities, feedback, etc – as this can have a major impact on corporate priorities and team success. Although most organizations have some form of performance appraisals and check-ins, it has been my experience that it is the exception rather than the rule that they are completed robustly, on time, and with everyone, including part-time and casual contributors (in fact some of you will argue that the whole PA system needs an overhaul anyway). 

In our growingly remote world of work, pulse surveys can be helpful to check in more frequently and on a broad scale about a range of satisfaction-related drivers. Even before working remotely, leaders’ spans of control (how many people report to them) often grows beyond the number that regular robust check-ins are possible.

In other words, employee engagement and pulse surveys have had an important place in the world of work.

This is the good news. Now the other side of the story.

Taking a Weak Pulse

Unfortunately, a few things continue to plague us with engagement surveys. The original best intentions – to understand, address and elevate the work experience of our contributors – has become usurped in the noise of corporate life. Here are some of the reasons engagement surveys get a bad name:

• The energy is put into promoting the surveys and increasing response rates, leaves little left over for disseminating or executing on results (one client compared it to planning her wedding and how “none of us wanted to go to the post-wedding day brunch we were all so tired!”)
• Many organizations can find willing participants to build or procure a vendor and execute the survey, however, it’s a unique talent and the organization may not have Organizational Development and related experts on staff (or on retainer) to help teams and leaders address gaps 
• The drivers we ask about include factors the organization is unable to change – such as asking not-for-profit employees if there are sufficient resources and supplies to do their job – so we set people up for disappointment
• Too often very practical and easy to address drivers (e.g., recognition) are intermingled with broader hard to address drivers (e.g., trust)
• There are significant time delays between when employee complete the survey to when – if at all – they hear the results
• The seriousness of issues raised in the comments creates a difficult situation for HR who want to address it, yet can’t due to confidentiality and anonymity
• On the flip side, many do not believe surveys are actually confidential and therefore getting honest responses or people to complete the survey at all can be challenging

Some have begun to suggest that we should no longer do engagements surveying. But is that really the answer? 

Getting a True Read on the Pulse

I would be hypocritical to say we should do away with engagement surveys:

• In my co-authored first book Forever Recognize Others Greatness, chapter 5 on organizational recognition leveraged a huge engagement survey database to tell the story of how dramatically different employee behaviour is when they were highly satisfied with recognition from those who were not
• I espouse the virtues of an engaged workforce when I keynote on recognition and encourage organizations to gauge just how well they’re doing with recognition through regularly informal and formal check-ins
• I remind my clients regularly that an engagement survey combined with other data – voluntary turnover, length of service, customer feedback, sick time – can provide a vivid picture of the health of the culture – Download these stats as a poster here called “Recognition is Not Fluffy Stuff”

If you just need a pulse of how people in the organization are doing, are committed to wholeheartedly listening, are willing to do something with the results, and will absolutely ensure people know the results, then engagement surveys can be incredibly valuable. In other words, the problem is not engagement surveys per se, it’s that we often treat them like a project to be delegated, outsourced and managed versus an invaluable tool to tell a broader story about the employee experience. 

Join me next week as we do a deep dive into how to make the most of your engagement survey investment and how to course correct your process if it’s gotten off track of your original intention.

In the meantime, if your engagement surveys have been telling you for years that you need to elevate recognition, I’ve shared all my secrets below. These are all the tools that I use to build (or rebuild) recognition programs now all in one short course (that HR folks, you get continuing education credits for.) 

For more ideas on engagement surveys and employee satisfaction, check out these other blog posts:

• Engagement Surveys
• Four Ways to Boost Employee Satisfaction
• Let’s Stop Talking About Employee Engagement and Instead Build Employee Experiences