Why your employee surveys won't tell you what you want to know (and what to do about it)

Employee surveys won’t give you the answers you want.

Why? Partly fatigue. By the time people get your survey, they’ve already been asked for their feedback, rating and review on 27 different products and services. Online surveys are too easy to put together and distribute. But that’s just a new sub-problem.

Surveys never have, and never will, give you the answers you want.

Unless you’re caught up on the whole idea of benchmarking. And if you are – well, then there’s a whole industry dedicated to scratching that itch.

Here’s the problem: You can’t predict all that your people might think.

It makes sense, doesn’t it? If you knew the answers, you wouldn’t ask the questions.

So, you’re stuck with missing stuff out or asking a bajillion questions. Missing stuff out sounds like a bad idea, so most people plump for the bajillion. And then add a few more, just to be sure.

For one, that’s not really playing well to the whole fatigue issue. For another, you’re still going to miss stuff.

So, here at Monteath Towers, we take a different approach.

We accept that we’ll miss stuff, but instead we want people to express themselves. We accept that we can’t predict all that your people might think, so we don’t try. Instead we ask them to tell us it all.

That means we pick only the most crucial fixed/scale questions. We do want some quant, we might want to see change over time. But those fixed questions serve another purpose. They are a stimulus and a prompt for free comment questions.

Because that’s where we see the real value. That’s where we can say: “Tell us what you really think, what you really want. We’re listening.”

The fixed questions are then just focussing that expression in free comment – they’re stimulating thoughts and ideas. They’re the germ of “you know what really hacks me off…” and “wouldn’t it be brilliant if…”.

It takes longer to analyse, but that’s because there is more to discover. There are themes to find, but also what truly resonates, where there is real strength of feeling. There are as-yet-unformed nuggets of ideas – ones that could be transformative if allowed to blossom. There are isolated niggles – ones that you could see could undermine all your efforts if unchecked.

But most of all, it shows you the priorities and what to investigate further.

Remember, whatever you do: Surveys won’t give you the answers you want. But they can allow to focus your next efforts with real precision and insight.

Your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind

When trying to impress or surprise, or sometimes appal, I mention that I hold a Joint Honours degree in Maths and Physics.

Undertaken following a series of perfectly avoidable mistakes, I was entirely unsuited to the course, and it subsequently hasn’t afforded me much advantage in life.

But it entrenched my passion for number, I won’t accept anything but a fair test, and, well, I love the process of science.

That’s beautifully expressed by Lord Kelvin; “…when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be.”

(Or rather more drearily by Peter Drucker: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”.)

Observing engagement and communication strategy, there is a consistent lack of measurement.

There may be lack of capability. There may be a lack of curiosity. There may not be the clout to get the budget or time to make the measurement. There’s perhaps an unwillingness to lift the lid.

But this I know. Lift that lid. Take a look. Measure effects. See what you find. Draw conclusions. And apply what you’ve learnt. Your clout-o-meter will rise, fast.

Look at what’s most important to your employees.

See how is best to reach them

Assess if what you propose to do will make an impact

Find out if you are cutting through.

All of this – and much more in your interactions with your people - is observable, quantifiable and therefore improvable.

Do more measurement.

But… you can go too far.

Hold in mind Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle “the more precisely the position of some particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum can be known, and vice versa”:

(Or, more mundanely, as Goodhart’s Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure)

Don’t get bogged down in the number. The number is there to justify the means, to target the message, to precisely focus the efforts.

Always remember that it is the powerful word, the galvanising mission and the human interaction that wins.

That’s what changes behaviour, generates ideas and unites people to a cause. That builds momentum.

Do more measurement (but always know your place).