Almost every organisation does it: an annual employee survey. The questionnaire goes round and the results are presented. And then? Often surprisingly little happens afterwards. The report disappears into a drawer, until the same questions go round again next year. No wonder employees get fed up. Filling in the survey is rarely the problem. People lose interest because nothing happens afterwards. Here is how to actually do something with the results.
Plenty of feedback, little action
Professor Ethan Burris and three colleagues spoke for Harvard Business Review with executives and HR leaders from more than two dozen large organisations, together employing more than two million people. Their conclusion: companies collect more feedback than ever, but are bad at turning it into action. And if that gap remains, employees at some point stop answering (HBR).
That makes sense. Anyone who honestly says what could be better and then hears nothing back learns only one thing: my opinion doesn't matter. A survey like that costs you time, and your people's trust as well.
Measure what matters
Before you can do anything, you do need to measure the right thing. Many organisations still mainly measure satisfaction: with pay, the workplace, communication. That looks back. Work engagement looks forward: how much energy do people have, how dedicated are they, and are they absorbed in their work (Schaufeli). That says much more about what you can expect from a team in the time ahead.
A good example comes from a clothing chain with hundreds of shops, described in HBR by authors including former Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly. The company started analysing employee data as seriously as customer data. The simple question of whether people enjoy their work turned out to be a strong predictor of results: employees with a lot of enjoyment in their work sold a quarter more per hour, measured over several years (HBR).
Gallup's large meta-analysis also shows that it pays to look at engagement. Compared with teams in the bottom quartile, teams in the top quartile for engagement scored, among other things, 78% lower absenteeism and 23% higher profitability (Gallup Q12 meta-analysis). Note: that is a comparison, not proof that one causes the other. But the pattern shows up in team after team.
One theme, two actions, three check-ins
The pitfall after a survey is wanting to tackle everything at once. You end up with twenty improvement points and ten working groups, and a year later nothing is finished. One of the companies in the HBR research works with a simple rule of thumb: choose one theme, do two concrete things about it, and check at least three times how it is going.
This is how to go about it:
- Report back quickly. Within a few weeks, show what the results are, including the less pleasant ones. Glossing over bad news is the fastest way to lose trust.
- Choose one theme together. Discuss the results per team and let the team itself choose what it wants to work on. People commit more to a solution they came up with themselves.
- Make it concrete. Two actions with an owner and a date. Not "better communication", but "a fifteen-minute team meeting about the week every Monday".
- Come back to it. Check after a month, after three months and after six months whether it helps. That way employees see that something is really happening.
- Measure again. A second measurement shows what your actions have achieved. That tells you whether you are doing the right things.
Paul van Heeringen of IMPACT on the Job sees the same thing happening in many organisations. The questionnaire goes round, is filled in and then disappears into a kind of black box. Dashboards appear, and consultants present the results to the board and management teams. Then the manager is mainly given the task of doing something about the scores. That leads to forced, awkward conversations with the team. That's not how it works: the team itself has to want to take up the results. Only when a team feels that the results and the solutions are really theirs will something change.
Start the conversation
Treat an employee survey as the start of a conversation with your teams. The report on its own won't get you far. When people see that their answers actually lead somewhere, they will take part honestly next time too.
Do you want to know where the energy in your organisation lies, and what to work on first? The Employee Engagement Survey by Leiders.nl measures work engagement rather than just satisfaction, and also shows how employees experience leadership. Also read employee satisfaction survey: from satisfaction to work engagement and work engagement: good for business!.
