Employee Surveys: They're still digging in the wrong place!

The notification pings on your desktop. Your employer has invited you to take part in this year’s Employee Opinion Survey!  Your face makes a strange involuntary shape and you sigh as you hit delete. You already know that this will be the first of numerous chirpy head-office reminders that “your opinion really does count”, so there is no need to leave the invite festering in your inbox.  Even if you neglect to complete the Survey, you are bound to receive an invite for some unconnected "pulse" survey to determine how motivated you are and gauge your propensity to “go the extra mile”. 

I am assured that there is well proven correlation between improved employee engagement and increased productivity and revenue growth. (Often though the correlation of that data is provided by the major Survey providers themselves, but that’s a petty quibble.) The problem is not that seeking to measure employee engagement is wrong. The real issue is that the design of employee surveys often concentrates on measuring the wrong things. They’re digging in the wrong place.  

Often these Surveys are based on employee engagement measures that neglect any focus on the customer, client, or other external stakeholder. Typically they look at employee satisfaction, future retention, how comfortable the working environment is, how the employee feels rewarded, praised or encouraged. Most have numerous questions to gauge how motivated we are, how we regard the senior team, and whether, or not, “we understand the strategy”. 

This is all helpful and interesting for the senior leadership team and, no doubt, is difficult to consistently score well against. But, by their very nature, the question set is too internally focused, often more likely to create discussion and feedback around hygiene factors [often literally!] about the workplace itself, rather than about how well supported employees are to serve and delight our customers. 

The most powerful item for any CEO and senior team to review together is the employee’s view of how well the organisation equips and supports the goal of meeting and exceeding customer expectations. Existing Surveys can be easily adapted to consider this so that employees can provide feedback not just on how they are served by their organisation, but how well the organisation serves them to provide extraordinary service to clients and customers. Focusing the Survey with this different emphasis would provide a more powerful, purposeful insight for the organisation than a bi-annual audit of internal factors.

This article updates a Linked-in post first written in 2016. Since then, nothing much has changed. The image is a cartoon by Hugh McLeod, from Gaping Void. You can buy prints like this at: www.gapingvoid.com