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.