Why You Should Ditch Your Employee Engagement Survey

Why? Simply because it's likely not helping your business. It might even be hurting you.

Now, if I'm wrong and your survey and the process does build trust within the company, result in meaningful actions being identified and performed, and you see employee relations improve, congratulations. Don't bother reading further.

Over and over again I see examples of companies doing engagement surveys that amount to (at best) a wee bit of meaningful discussion at the senior leader level, and the box being checked for having done this. All too often I see businesses do harm with these because they don't report back the data to employees, the senior leaders fail to take ownership of the results, and an action plan that is meaningful and realistic (and one with 25 actions is not realistic) does no emerge. After a couple of rounds of this, employees grow to resent the charade and the relationship between leadership and employees takes a hit.
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No wonder engagement hasn't increased meaningfully even after so much time and money going into surveys!

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Here are the common failings that I see with employee engagement surveys and the process overall:

1. Surveys are used as the ultimate diagnostic. That's like saying that one medical test tells you everything about someone's health. The survey data should point you where to poke around to learn more, and where to start to make changes. More personal, direct feedback from employees will really reveal the issues and opportunities. Employees have the answers.
2. Negative results terrify leaders. "We cannot possibly share these results!" you may hear them say. But when there is critical, constructive feedback offered, it's a golden moment for leaders to show vulnerability and take ownership of the situation, and demonstrate humility by their openness to learning more from employees and pursuing change. Few and far between are the leaders who are ready to seize the incredible opportunity at this point.
3. The survey results are too granular. Item-by-item data is not where the insights are. Summary data that helps to reveal highest and lowest results, variation across segments (e.g., What did senior leaders rate significantly higher than the rest of the company? These indicate blindspots and may point to critical areas to focus on.), and anomalies. Rarely do survey reports provide meaningful summaries. And who in your company has time to generate those?

The biggest issue I see with employee engagement is the misconception that the business can really change one's internal engagement. One's engagement level has influences far beyond the scope of the business. A business can make someone disengaged (especially with environments where there is intense unfairness or negative communication patterns like bullying and harassment), but a business cannot make someone be engaged.

Companies can control employee experience, but not employee engagement. Are employees having overall positive or negative experiences? What aspects of the employee experience are especially positive or negative?

​Employee experience data, rather than engagement data, leads to thinking about people more than numbers. In turn, this drives meaningful action by the company to develop the experience - and likely the engagement - of employees.

So, are you ready to try a new, more people-centered approach? Here are action steps:

1. Use an experience survey and communicate to your employees your commitment to understanding and supporting their experience.
2. Think of the survey as one data point, but use other data points to help you get a broader picture: feedback groups, observations, interviews, other survey data (e.g., candidate surveys, exit interview data).
3. Leverage the brief opportunity you have shortly after you get the results back to share openly the results, take ownership, and outline clear next steps (which may be some more data gathering).
4. Limit yourself to only a handful of action items for improvement of the employee experience. There is tremendous power in identifying one focus point for the upcoming period (a year? a quarter?) and go deep with that rather than broad. (Examples: Build stronger relationships between managers and employees. Clarify roles, performance measures and feedback mechanisms.)

You know the definition of insanity, right? Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Are you ready for a new approach?