Is Your Employee Engagement Surveys a Waste of Time?

Throughout our 25 years of conducting employee engagement surveys, numerous people have told us that surveys are a huge waste of time and just don’t work. In many cases, they’re absolutely right. It’s important to acknowledge the thousands of employees and managers who believe the whole survey process is a big waste of time, and the perfectly legitimate reasons behind their beliefs. It’s equally important to note that when surveys are utilized correctly, they are a powerful tool in the pursuit of workplace excellence and happy employees. When the process goes awry, however, they are a waste of both time and money.

Learn how to improve employee engagement surveys through 9 examples of when the process has been a complete failure.

Senior Management doesn’t support the process. Every human resource professional wants to make a difference by improving the organization’s culture and turning it into a place where employees love coming to work. But, if the CEO and senior leaders don’t fully support conducting a survey, it’s destined to fail.

In these situations, the survey becomes a chore that needs to be completed quickly and crossed off their long to-do list. Once the survey is completed, the only goal becomes to not ever conduct the survey again. When the senior management team is unsupportive, response rates also tend to be very low. It is essential that senior leaders support the process in order for it to succeed and improve the organization’s culture.

The survey is not customized. If you’re going to ask employees to commit time to taking the survey, you better ask them about topics that are relevant. Pre-survey interviews are critical to the process so you know what questions to ask. Knowing what is going well or right from the employees’ perspective, as well as the areas where employees feel the company has opportunities for improvement, will help with the development of a meaningful survey.

Simple, canned surveys with a few half-baked questions consistently fail to move the needle of engagement. These surveys are a contributing factor to the stagnant engagement levels we’ve had for nearly 20 years. Customizing the survey to your organization is a must!

The questions are not actionable. In addition to being customized, the questions need to be ones managers and employees can actually act on to improve. They need to provide enough information to determine why their results may be low.  In typical engagement surveys, there are many questions aimed at determining an employee’s level of engagement:

• “I look forward to coming to work.”
• “My job is personally satisfying.”

These are great engagement questions, but they don’t tell managers why employees don’t look forward to coming to work.  Is it a lack of tools, training, problem solving, teamwork, performance expectations or trust in management? We inherit a lot of surveys from new clients that don’t nail down the ‘why.’  You need to ensure you ask questions around the possible cause as well as ensure those questions are something that the manager is able to action plan around.

Fail to segment the data by ownership. If you want your survey to fail, then just report back the overall organization’s data. When the data isn’t broken down by division, department, branch, or leader, it’s impossible for anyone to take ownership. If there are five or more employees, you have enough to create a meaningful breakdown.

Don’t act on the results. In every organization we survey, there are managers who don’t communicate their team’s results to their employees. Even worse, some managers provide the team’s results, but then fail to create a plan of the actions they will take to improve on the weaknesses reflected by the survey. Failing to act on the survey results erodes the culture and morale of the team. Why did they bother providing feedback if it wasn’t going to be acted on?

Survey isn’t anonymous. When surveys are conducted in-house, there is always a suspicion that someone knows who answered what on the survey. Using a third-party administrator significantly improves the integrity of the surveys as well as employee response rates. Also, when the data is broken down to less than 5 employees, confidentiality and anonymity quickly erodes.

Leadership doesn’t listen. I’ve encountered hundreds of managers who looked at their department’s survey data and told me they know exactly why their scores are low. One manager told me, “I have three employees who don’t like me or the changes I’ve initiated. “ Another manager shared, “If the employees in this department don’t know what the goals are, they shouldn’t be working here.”  Instead of listening to understand, these managers were more comfortable assuming why employees responded the way they did. Take the feedback as a gift and appreciate that you employees had the guts to tell you how the department could be even better.

Shoot the messenger. One manager we worked with was in stunned disbelief when the survey results showed his employees did not trust him. To confirm to himself that these results had to be wrong, he called his team together and asked, “Who doesn’t trust me?” and, “What have I even done that makes you not trust me?” Sure enough, everyone in the meeting said, “Hey, we trust you. I thought the question was referring to other areas of management.” The manager responded, “Good, because on the next survey, these results need to change.” When leaders feel the employees are wrong or just don’t get it, they communicate loud and clear that they’re not going to listen to employees’ feedback.

Delay providing the survey results to employees. When other pressing corporate issues or the management team’s lack of organizational effectiveness results in delayed reporting of the results to employees, the employees only think one thing: “The results must have been really bad.” Even worse, delayed results allow managers who don’t support the process to say, “the results were bad when the survey was conducted, but it’s been 6 months now and I think all these issues have been resolved.” There’s a good chance those issues haven’t been resolved. Surveys are a snapshot in time, but if employees took the time to give you their feedback, take the time to act on it.

After conducting hundreds of Employee Engagement and Opinion Surveys for organizations, we are more convinced than ever that these surveys are critical tools in assessing the effectiveness of your leadership team and the health of your company. Organizations that administer customized, anonymous surveys and take concrete action based on the results, are much more likely to successfully improve the culture of their organization.

The bottom line:  Don’t conduct an employee engagement survey unless you have senior management’s support; are willing to accept employee feedback and honestly evaluate what the results are telling you; and finally, take the necessary actions to foster workplace excellence.