How to Understand and Survey Your Employees in Ways That Won’t Piss Them Off

We’ve all been there, done that. Whether it’s your shopping experience, healthcare, gaming, restaurant, restroom, or workplace experience — everybody everywhere wants you to fill out their follow up survey or give them an experience score. And, after a while, we all feel like: “If I have to fill out one more damn survey, it automatically gets scored 0 out of ten smiley faces! ... Argh!”

And while every part of our world, including employee experiences, can now collect tons of data through our stuff and our use of that stuff — (IoT, Internet of Things) — everybody still wants to know how we felt, our degree of happiness, or satisfaction. 

Leaders: How to Stop Pissing Off Your Employees In How You Survey Them

1) Most importantly, ACTUALLY CHANGE THINGS based on the data you collect! The overwhelming majority of employees around the world know that you’re not really going to do anything when what they tell you needs to be addressed! By not doing anything for so long, you have pre-trained your employees to grimace and go “Why bother?!” (On the same web page that Gallup crows about its 35 years of perfecting the science of understanding employee engagement, it admits that global employee engagement is only at 15%, and in the USA it's in the mid-30s%. These overall numbers have been in the same basement the whole time — haven't budged for nearly four decades! Does anybody still wonder why today's employees are dubious about business' seriousness in truly engaging them?!)

2) Ask about things that MATTER TO THEM, not just what matters to you and your corporate bean counters. (The majority of what's surveyed is still very corporate-centered, not individual-centered.)

3) Whenever you DO make changes based on surveys/feedback: Communicate, communicate, communicate. Make a direct connection between what’s changing and that their feedback directed the change. Keep making that connection, again and again, until the culture has shifted to trusting that their feedback will truly cause change within your organization.

4) Let’s assume you’ve done 1), 2), and 3). There’s still one more step to take to greatly reduce a lot of the follow-up surveying and scoring. 

Build evals into the actual user and learner experience. Build learning loops into every activity at natural pauses or stopping points. Make EVERY work activity a LEARNING EXERIENCE. Not just inserting by “Tell us if you’re happy” evaluations. But more “What were your Ahas? … What will you do differently? ... Help us do things differently. … Who should we recognize/reward? … How could we make this easier?,” etc.

Reduce the frequency of numbered scoring — (“On a scale of 1 to 5…” etc.) — to the barest minimum needed to track upticks or downturns; and increase the number of qualitative feedback — (allowing the employee to respond however they wish). Doing so through voice recognition (verbal, no use of keyboard) as much as possible. Today’s advances in AI, advanced analytics, and machine learning make these approaches not only possible, but they will be tomorrow’s competitive advantage.

All work everywhere needs to do a much better job of building continuous learning into most every activity. So the biggest senior leadership mindset shift is in switching from just quantitative scores for managing the business to more qualitative scores that help you build the best continuous learning and joyful experiences.

I’ve been employing this technique for over three decades. (Obviously, with pre-AI technologies.) During the past 30+ years, I’ve interviewed and surveyed over 1,000,000 people as part of our ongoing study, The Search for a Simpler Way. Some of that data collection and research was done during workshops, coaching, and speaking engagements. 

During activities and breakout discussions, learners would process what they just learned. Within that processing was an occasional qualitative research question to better understand workplace trends and their additional needs, as well as quantitative research about what they just learned. It was so unobtrusive and easy that every learner saw it as part of the learning process.

Now, with today’s and tomorrow’s technologies, every organization can easily build unobtrusive learning loops into work and learning activities. That’s all part of the ever-changing future of work landscape.  

Jensen Site, Twitter, FB. Bill’s upcoming book, The Day Tomorrow Said No, is a powerful fable about the future of work. (Spring 2020.) A fable specifically designed to revolutionize conversations about the future between leaders, the workforce, educators, and students. Go here to download a FREE copy of the final pre-press draft of the book.