How Employee Engagement Surveys are USELESS...And Why they Remain Invaluable

Gaining employee insight and opinions concerning satisfaction, culture, communications, relationships, and environment is a constant necessity for leaders. The information obtained from such research keeps the organization “honest” internally supporting strategy implementation, transformation or change, managerial effectiveness, corporate initiatives, employee value proposition, and cultural norms, to name a few.

This is apropos to any discussion on employee engagement surveys because, in too many organizations, they’re either an incredible window into the soul of the company or a colossal waste of time, either knowingly or unknowingly designed to temporarily deflect attention from more meaningful dialogue.

  The Holy Grail for global business executives today is employee engagement. And well it should. Recent studies indicate that close to 85% of employees (some studies as high as 88%) believe they can positively impact quality of their organization’s products and services. The sad truth though is that those same studies indicate less than 1/3 of employees globally are actively engaged in their jobs.

  Engagement is about individual behavior. It’s about individual curiosity. People who have both an emotional and intellectual bond to the organization. Disengaged employees not only exhibit less than satisfactory behavior as it relates to performance, but they also produce less revenue for the business.

  It is for these reasons that leaders and communicators alike are spending significant resources to uncover the elements of engagement. 

  How so? Rather than do what they’re supposed to do – serve as a means for employees to advise leadership on the effectiveness of its management or operating model and the relevance of its communications - they instead are designed to seek the right answers to the wrong questions.

  The workforce generally responds in one of two ways: by telling management what it wants to hear, or by truthfully professing any ignorance or confusion about the company’s business focus, strategic direction, and employer proposition. The first approach accomplishes nothing productive beyond a “false positive” opportunity for management, and the second approach is often used to chase symptoms resulting in “morale committees”, “culture task forces” or internal campaigns on strategy.

An Outcome Not a Goal

  The reason for such misdirection is that often organizations define “engagement” as a goal or even a strategy when in fact, it’s an outcome.

  Real engagement happens because of several interrelated actions including but not limited to management behaviors; open and transparent culture; participatory decision-making; clear and consistent communications; team-oriented project management; rewards and recognition efforts; and compensation policies. 

   Once engagement is defined as an outcome, organizations can stop chasing their tail, so to speak, and move their focus from symptoms to the cause.

  Check out the employee engagement survey practices of some of the leading management consulting and research firms, and you’ll see that these surveys usually aren’t really conceived to engage at all; they’re conceived to generate statistically laden checklists and metrics to provide managements with insight into the shortcomings of their workforce. They presume senior management “knows all” and put the onus for improvement and performance on the general workforce.

  This isn’t a clarion call for the abolition of engagement surveys. Quite the contrary: approached properly – as a referendum on leadership – and they can be highly valuable. The key, of course, is to approach them the right way.

  Some enlightened organizations do that already. Consider the following input gleaned from a variety of top-tier companies. I’ve left the identity of these senior managers anonymous to encourage their openness about internal subject matter.

  “We’re proud of what we do: we view our engagement surveys as a core strategic, competitive edge,” says a senior communicator at a large technology company. “We believe the more highly engaged our associates are, the more productive they are. We implement a new survey every one or two years. We don’t sugarcoat our results (for senior management). Our executives talk about the results often and build engagement into our enterprise targets.” The manager adds that the company doesn’t worry about measuring scores but rather, “participation in the survey and progress made…across the enterprise….If we incented the score, associates might fill it out more positively than they really believe.”

  A global healthcare organization senior manager notes that conducted properly, engagement surveys “can help you set your strategic approach by giving you a sense of what people really think, anonymously.” Another senior communicator from a manufacturing company concurs, observing that engagement surveys can offer “a true sense of how committed people are” and how effectively management is leading – particularly related to the toughest issues facing the organization.

  This manager notes that engagement surveys can also uncover cases of senior management being tone deaf. After a downsizing, for example, many employees used the survey to voice displeasure that former colleagues’ offices were left untouched – down to empty coffee cups still sitting on the desks. “It was bizarre,” he notes, and employees weren’t happy about it. The survey offered a haven for employees to raise the subject – not a communications issue, per se, but one that absolutely impacted engagement.

  That’s the crucial point: before even embarking on an engagement survey, commit to doing so for the right reason: to gather useful, previously unknown, and under-considered information that senior management will absorb and respond to! Not through “morale committees” that put the impetus for change on employees, but through new approaches to engaging employees’ minds and hearts.

  “It’s not about hearts and flowers,” says a senior communications officer at an iconic insurance enterprise. “It’s about shoring up gaps. Employees need to know that the feedback they provide results in real action.”

  Getting the most from Engagement Research …

•  Above all, instead of just tracking and reporting on engagement across a spectrum of areas such as “management interaction” or “adherence to values” compile an overall statement reflecting the situation pointing to the organization’s management model. Doing so mitigates the knee jerk reaction to apply actions against each of the areas vs. developing an overall strategy. 
• Recognize the real audience. It’s not employees! The real audience is leadership! Engagement is an outcome of the company’s current management model. At a minimum, the model needs to be recalibrated to deliver a more engaged workforce.  If you believe employees are the audience, then all the effort is communicating results of the survey back to them instead of fixing the areas they identified.
• Make Engagement an organizational priority! Once the results are in, assemble the right people from around the business to determine how best to address the findings leading to a holistic effort that improves engagement.
• Be consistent: implement these surveys at least once a year. Once every other year is OK if you have mechanisms in place to gather feedback in the intervening years. One communicator interviewed above says his organization implements “mini surveys” in the years between more extensive surveying.
• Be objective: for most companies, it makes sense to engage a third party to implement and analyze engagement surveys, to avoid bias and make employees more confident their anonymity will be preserved.
• Finally…be level-headed: Almost as bad as ignoring feedback is responding too aggressively, too quickly. Take the time to truly assess the feedback and what it says about the effectiveness of current leadership policies and decisions. Then systematically address the findings.

  A New Approach

  Before identifying what to do to improve engagement at your organization, here are three things to avoid when developing research:

1.  Ill-designed - Check your questions and determine if the answers provide any insight into how people behave. Many engagement surveys only address what people say about involvement or communications or knowledge sharing or collaboration. 

 For example, engagement surveys typically ask, "how would you like to receive information about the company's strategy or direction", and often, the typical response from employees is 'through my manager/supervisor." However, in today's matrix-structured organizations, interaction with managers is often limited or muted due to reporting lines and organizational design. Without a major overhaul in such things, this is not helpful. Rather, have the survey ask about the interactions with managers/supervisors taking place today and how they might be improved. This will provide insight on things that can be changed.

 Also, don’t ask simply, “Do you know the company’s strategic direction.” This almost always elicits a “No” and has communicators scrambling to inundate the workforce with content. The underlying answer is that employees equate strategy with activity including manager behavior, leadership rhetoric, customer service, and the like. It’s not that they don’t understand the business strategy it’s that they don’t see it being implemented.  

 2) Action Dis-Oriented - Again, the survey or research must be conducted to enact a new set of actions within the organization led by management to improve the overall relationship between the company and its workforce. Reassess your research instrument to see if it's action oriented.

 3) Myopic - So much engagement research places the respondents - employees - in a proverbial box in terms of their ability to answer holistically. For example, this question tends to pop up a lot on surveys, "what types of content would you like on our portal that would lead to your increased involvement in the organization?" The responses to this question often cite "more information on our vision, strategy, priorities, etc. However, employees may or may not even be going to the portal with any regularity as to know what's already there! The question forces to people answer in an artificial manner.

 The Real Value

 Establishing and maintaining engagement internally is all about integration and alignment. In the end, research is meant to identify the areas in which engagement is being thwarted or advanced including the organization's management model or how it manages the enterprise.

 The results of any research must be dissected and shared among all key functions comprising the management model so that a proper solution can be devised and enacted. Having individual groups or teams run around implementing tactics without any cohesion is a waste of time and resources leaving employees confused and cynical and the business itself less than optimal. 

 Gary