Why Employee Satisfaction Surveys Don’t Work

Employee surveys were popular in the 20th century, and they mostly ended up in a drawer because they didn't make sense. Yet yesterday somebody showed me one from...this week! . Really?! Come on guys, we should get over them because:

1. They measure something that doesn't matter: Satisfaction or Happiness. These are not your goals or commitment, these are by-products.
2. It's too late to Fix Anything.?Surveys measure what happened in the past. Is there any damage? It's done; people are gone.
3. Employees Don’t Trust Them—Even if surveys are “anonymous,” people don’t believe them, leading to sugarcoated or false answers.

It’s Not Your Job to Keep Employees Happy—But You Must Keep Them on Track

A manager’s job isn’t to make employees happy or satisfied—that’s impossible, as they spend most of their time outside direct supervision. Instead, a manager’s responsibility is to create the right environment: a secure, structured, and supportive space where employees have what they need to hit their KPIs under serious and coherent leadership.

If a business needs a ping pong table, free fruit, or a physiotherapist just to keep employees engaged, it has completely misunderstood what business is about: results. Satisfaction and happiness are byproducts of effective work—not the goal itself. Some of the happiest teams are the least productive, while some highly productive teams aren’t necessarily satisfied. So why are we still correlating these two?

Fixing the real problems is key, and a ping pong table isn’t fixing anything—it’s just another distraction. Worse, it can feel like an insult to employees who are expecting serious attention to their challenges.

Turning Mood Tracking into a Company-Wide KPI

To make this system effective, companies should track a corporate mood score—a number reflecting the average team morale across all departments. Most businesses would start with shockingly low numbers, likely between 1 and 3 out of 10. And low mood means bad motivation, which negatively impacts every area of the business.

Instead of relying on outdated annual surveys, managers must have real-time insights into how their employees feel. Measuring team mood at the moment is the only way to get reliable, actionable data. Later, you can analyze patterns and figure out what’s happening—but not a year later when it’s too late to fix.

A Simple, Real-Time Fix: Mood Check-Ins

Instead of surveys, companies should install physical feedback boxes and Apps (once trust is in place) with red and green buttons. Employees can press a button daily to answer a simple question: “How do you feel today?”

• Instant insights – No waiting for results, managers see the team’s mood immediately.
• Ongoing feedback – This is not a one-time survey but daily tracking.
• Easy and trustworthy – No long forms, just a quick button press, making it more likely that people will use it and stay in the heart. More questions? You move to the head and that's where you should not be at this point.
• Private and anonymous - very important, employees seldom trust their managers. Such devices are used because they guarantee total privacy, unlike the surveys.

Companies like 2daysmood.com, company-mood.com, and ratenow.es already offer such measurement tools, providing physical mood-tracking boxes and apps to measure employee sentiment in real-time. Do you want to try it? Contact them and tell them I sent you.

The 100-Day Challenge for Managers

Instead of handing off problems to HR or outside consultants, managers should take on a 100-day challenge to double their team’s mood score. Here’s how it works:

• Managers talk directly to their team, find out what’s wrong, and fix it.
• If they need help, the company supports them privately before taking broader action.
• Common issues usually involve bad leadership, complicated processes, or frustrating tech—so fixing the real problems is key.

The mentioned tools don't yet work that way so if you feel like doing a trial, contact me directly.

How AI Can Help

AI can make it even better. AI tools can help analyze mood trends, predict issues, and suggest solutions based on real-time data, but people respond to people, so dear managers, put on your overalls and get down into the arena.

Time to Focus on That Mood Data

Back to the Employee Survey I saw yesterday. I truly sit with curved tows at my desk. 40 years later, still making the same mistakes. Come on please!

Let's focus on the only true meta KPI, which is how people come in, and make sure solutions can be addressed right now. By tracking team mood daily and challenging managers to improve it, businesses can boost engagement, productivity, and overall success and hey, if some feel happier or more satisfied about that, that's great.

But let’s stop overcomplicating things and start listening to how people feel—every day, in real-time.