5 Ways You Are Screwing Up Employee Surveys
Over the past 5 years, myself and our team of Plasticity PhDs have reviewed hundreds of surveys and thousands of responses. We've also learned a lot along the way - and we regularly see organizations who are guilty of five common missteps in the way that they collect data and act on employee insights. In our opinion, these are the five most common errors, in no particular order. So as to not seem too self-serving - today I will only be discussing the common errors, not the solutions.
So. In no particular order, you might be screwing up your employee survey if…
1) It takes too long to get results. If you can’t get and act on the insights within two weeks of collecting the data, you’ve got problems. Your assessment might be too large, or your management apparatus isn’t nimble enough to adjust to fresh insight. Depending on your vendor, you might not get survey results for multiple months and burning embers can grow into burning fires in that time. Stale insights aren’t insightful - especially in volatile and fast-moving organizations. You can have the most accurate GPS in the world, but it falls flat if it tells you to turn left 3 blocks too late. Insights need to be agile.
2) You’re not sharing the results with enough or the right people. Important insights have the potential to deliver value at every layer of the organization. You might lack the confidence to share these insights up, down, or across; you might not be getting the insights in a format that is adjusted for different viewers; you might be getting data that is too confidential to share directly. But, if you don’t share why results matter and demonstrate how that you are listening, people will stop taking the assessments seriously. This might require some straight talk with yourself or your leadership. We get it. Sharing results takes courage. But being average is easy, it takes courage to be awesome.
3) You’re not considering employees' well-being. Whether you’re looking to learn about employee engagement, performance, culture, or even customer satisfaction, all of our data and research demonstrates that employee well-being flows both in and out of these buckets. These concepts are all intertwined, whether you like it or not. And well-being has a bigger role than you may think. When conditions are negative for too long, it will begin to impact employee well-being and negative outcomes will only accelerate. The importance of well-being is becoming more understood, but it may not be on your radar yet. But loving your work and loving your organization means much less if you're not coming into work healthy. Boosting well-being is how you make the most of a great culture - but you have to measure it first, and I bet your employees' well-being scores are lower than you expect.
4) You’re not acting strategically. How many organizations do the same engagement survey every year because it's "what you’ve always done"? This is the worst rationale in business. If you can’t use your results to point directly to your strategic objectives, then the survey is a waste of your time and your money. Someone has to own this connection and if you want people to act based on the results, it should align with your strategic plan. It’s also how you keep your board and executive teamed interested in getting and using the results, and increases the probability of getting needed funding to solve problems or invest in capacity. Unfortunately, this one is way more common then you might think.
5) It’s not anonymous. Or, equally as important, people do not believe that it's anonymous. The number one reason you should run employee assessments is to get to the raw truth, and act on it. Acting on false data gets you nowhere. If employees do not believe that their survey is anonymous, you will always have a barrier to honest responses. If you genuinely want honesty, and you should, then promising anonymity is critical to success. This one is more important than it is hard, but you might be downplaying its importance.
It’s been our pleasure to work with hundreds of organizations who recognized one or a few of these patterns in their history and felt that it was time to do better. Helping leaders understand and improve the state of affairs in their workplace helps us to accomplish our mission of supporting happier, healthier, higher performing folks. As as a key part of that mission, it fills my bucket to help organizations gather data and act on it in the best way.
Learn more about how we can help if you're thinking about an improved approach to collecting employee insights: