'I love surveys. I just feel like most companies are really bad at them': academic on survey overload and opening other lines of communication
While a push for employee engagement has led to increased employee listening programs, the result – a virtual tidal wave of employee feedback – is overwhelming already strapped managers and HR professionals, reports are finding.
Plus, much of this employee feedback is around efficiency and improving work systems – suggestions which they say aren’t being heard or even asked for.
According to Catherine Connelly, professor of organizational behaviour at McMaster University, this gap in employee feedback and employer action can threaten the future of an organization.
“This is a huge problem in many organizations. What this results in is stagnant organizations that fail to innovate,” she says.
“It's very common for the people who do the work, who actually do the work, to notice ways where it could be made more efficient, or it could be streamlined, or it can be done faster, or it could result in better customer service or client service within the organization, because they do it every day.”
A recent report by Perceptyx found that while 95% of HR leaders increased or maintained employee listening programs in the past year, only 27% believe their programs will help achieve business goals. This is a sharp drop from 43% the previous year.
“Employee input makes companies more efficient. It makes them more innovative. It makes them more adaptable,” Connelly says.
“Taking employee suggestions seriously leads to employees who are more engaged and continue coming up with even better suggestions.”
However, many organizations are not open to those suggestions; a recent survey from U.S.-based Eagle Hill Consulting found that most employees (78 per cent) say they talk with colleagues regularly about issues of efficiency at their workplaces, and 66 percent say they’ve shared their ideas with their organization.
But more than half (56 per cent) say their organizations don’t reward those efforts, and 41 per cent say they are rarely or never asked about efficiency by their employer. This reality leads to stagnation, Connelly says.
Source: Perceptyx
A major issue is that feedback can sometimes be dismissed if a direct supervisor is not receptive or knowledgeable of the issue. Connelly notes that organizations should open alternative lines of communication for employees to communicate their ideas to other leaders who will be receptive.
“Sometimes HR can be that conduit. Not always, but sometimes in relation to issues around safety or training, there can be somebody else that could be open to hearing about it.”
Even when employee suggestions are heard, managers often lack the skills or resources to implement them – the Perceptyx report found that over 40% of HR leaders report significantly increased workloads, with 30% considering leaving the profession. Additionally, one in three is experiencing exhaustion, and one in four reports being fully burned out.
Connelly suggests that training for managers in handling feedback could be a solution.
“It’s a big part of the jobs for managers, is to have that kind of relationship with your employees,” she says.
“Where you do listen to their concerns and you take them seriously, and you try to explain either why things have to be done a certain way, or you work with them to try to change how things are done. So I think HR could provide training to managers in how to lead those conversations.”
Excessive feedback from too many surveys also adds to workloads, she says, and cautions against overwhelming employees with broad surveys that fail to drive change. Although HR departments mean well with employee surveys, effective surveys that provide useful data are complicated to create.
“I love surveys. I just feel like most companies are really bad at them,” Connelly says, explaining that employee surveys that aren’t designed carefully will produce unreliable results as they leave too much to interpretation.
“Maybe there's been a question asked, and half of the people interpret it this way, the other half thought you meant something else, or maybe you're asking a question but it's actually two questions, and so they agree with part of it, but not the other part.”
Rather than many surveys asking a range of questions, surveys should be kept simple and only rolled out once per quarter at the most, Connelly says, and even suggests employee surveys be limited to the following factors:
Job satisfaction
Satisfaction with co-workers
Satisfaction with supervisors
Plans to leave or seek other work.
“Those things will give you a good sense,” she says.
“If you want to go further, you could ask about their commitment to the organization, and where that's stemming from. So if they feel an emotional attachment to the organization, or if they're just staying because they feel they have to, or that they don't feel like they could get a better job elsewhere – that will tell you a lot about how much effort people are willing to put into their work.”
Rather than surveys such as 360-degree reviews of colleagues, which also garner results that are skewed by social and retaliation fears, Connelly recommends HR leaders facilitate direct, targeted conversations that address specific issues.
“Start with the data that they have first and then dig into that with targeted conversations with specific people, and make it very clear about why what information is being sought and why it’s needed, and then how it will be used,” she says.
“If people are at the table, you’re telling them what you need, you’re asking them what you need to know, and you’re telling them why you need to know it and how it’s going to be used, then people can tell you a lot more nuanced information about what they think is going on.”
The Eagle Hill survey reported that 42 per cent of employees said they don’t feel empowered by their organization to implement changes based on their ideas, and 83 per cent say their workplace struggles to generate efficiency ideas at all.
Employees often avoid speaking up due to past experiences or workplace culture, Connelly explains, and over time this effect can lead to high turnover as employees would rather leave than try to improve their work conditions.
“There are a lot of employees who are reluctant to criticize their bosses or criticize the organization in any way, depending on how their top leaders behave and depending on how their direct supervisor behaves,” shesays.
“If ever they have made a suggestion and it’s been met with indifference or even hostility, then they will learn quickly, and the others around them will learn quickly that it’s better to just not say anything.”
Creating an environment where employees feel safe sharing their ideas is critical, and a shift in how organizations interpret complaints or criticism is the key. As Connelly explains, rather than being seen as problem employees, those who speak up should be valued.
“They’re actually being a good citizen,” she says.
“It is so much easier to just say nothing, but if an employee has taken the time to notice something and to say something, then that needs to be acknowledged … this is putting the interests of the organization ahead of maybe the social risks of criticizing somebody around you or somebody immediately above you. So these people who speak up, it's not always easy to do that, and it should be treated like a citizenship behaviour, not as a counter-productive workplace behaviour.”
