The Problem with Employee Surveys

Employee surveys don’t give you the information you need to make a good action plan, people aren’t honest, and toxic managers always look to retaliate for bad reviews. 

“Answer the questions honestly, your answers are anonymous”

Well, they may be anonymous, but that sure isn’t going to stop your supervisor from trying to figure out who wrote what comment.

I know it happens, I’ve seen it first hand…every. single. time.

Why do managers do this though? Well, because it’s really hard to admit you’re the problem. It’s much easier to just point at someone else and say “they just don’t like me.”

Beyond that, the data you get from a survey is pretty much useless. 

Take the following question “I Trust My Manager” that has responses ranging from strongly agree (far left) to strongly disagree (far right):

So what exactly does that tell us? Do we have a problem with a leader? Do his direct reports not trust him for some reason? Why did those few people give a 4 rating instead of a 5?

Or what about “I Often look for other jobs” with responses ranging from Strongly Agree (far left) to Strongly Disagree (far right):

Are you about to have a retention problem? What can you do about people looking for jobs? What is the tenure of those looking? Is it people who just started? Or is it your more senior employees? Are they looking because they want to move back home? Do they not like your culture? Do they not believe in your business? Do they hate their manager?

What were those people who answered “neutral” thinking. What does that even mean?

How about when it says, “Your team is 78% engaged”

Umm…what?

Seriously, can anyone tell me what that actually means? Reminds me of those “1 Like = 1 Respect” memes. There are a lot of things I can objectively count, engagement is not one of them. 

The data is useless.

It doesn’t matter how many fancy charts you can present it with, you can’t DO anything about this data set.

And that’s supposed to be the whole point behind an employee survey right? Find your problems and fix them.

But this survey only leaves you with more questions! 

Senior leaders understand this, so what solution have they come up with? Sit down with your teams and discuss the survey…

The point of that meeting is to get to the root cause behind the responses, but if you have a toxic manager, no one is going to speak up and be honest! Retaliation is guaranteed!

Create a Champion!

This is the other favorite methodology for dealing with ambiguous employee survey responses. Create a project champion to work on whatever issues were identified in the survey.

So what happens? You sit down with your team, assign an additional task to someone to solve this problem they identified in the survey, then you add that to their goals for their end of year evaluation.

So now, your employee has to work on something they identified as a problem with the corporate culture. Whatever they come up with has to be inside of their span of control, but the problem itself is outside of that, so it’s not really going to get fixed.

BUT…

You do a survey a year later and BOOM, the numbers improved! 

Huzzah! We fixed the problem!

No…no you didn’t. 

You just trained your employees to lie to you. 

That’s right. You have smart people working for you. They understand that if they identify an issue, it’s just going to mean more work for them in the future. They also know that nothing will genuinely change from the employee survey, so they aren’t going to bother. 

Next survey, pencil whip 5’s all the way and just be done with it. Then go dust off your resume and click “recruiters can contact me” button on LinkedIn. 

Meanwhile, your survey says your team is 85% engaged (whatever the heck that means), when in reality, they are even more disillusioned and DIS-engaged than before! 

So what is the solution?

You can do one on one conversations!

If you are a manager, you need to be doing one on ones. You should be doing them monthly with your direct reports, and at LEAST semi-annually with those two levels down. 

This is how you are going to identify the root problems you are facing, and also identify those toxic leaders in the midst. 

By the way, toxic leaders don’t like to do one on ones, and when they do, they use them to get team members to update them on projects instead of getting to know the people that report to them.

You’re only going to find this out if you’re talking to the people that report to you!

Of course, another option is to apply for one of our leadership projects and let me and my team come down. We will do those face to face interviews and get to the root causes, then give you the information you seek so you can take ACTION and improve your business!

K, Love you, bye

-LJF