FIX Your Employee Engagement Survey With These TIPS

So you're about to send out an employee engagement survey in hopes that you will understand more about your team and learn about potential solutions to challenges and obstacles that your employees are facing on a day to day basis and using that information to put together a program that's going to improve all of the things that every employee said. I get it. You're hoping that that's going to improve employee engagement across the board, right? Bomb. The only problem is employee surveys don't work. I've conducted these surveys myself. I've been with organizations that have had these surveys. I even have clients that still push out these surveys in hopes to finding all of the answers to all of the challenges that they have through dozens of leaders, hundreds of companies. Employee surveys just don't work. If you want to improve employee engagement and improve your company culture, there is something else that you can do instead of an employee engagement survey. Today we're going to talk about why employee surveys don't work and what you need to do instead of. And you can start doing this immediately following this video because you're going to learn how to get quality employee feedback and determine the solutions that go with that feedback, all of which will improve employee engagement, drive a better culture without sending one stinking survey. So let's dive into it.

So here's the brutally honest truth about employee surveys that most people don't want to talk about. They really don't work. And I'm going to give you the reasons why they don't work. Employee surveys take too long to create. They take too long to actually fill out the surveys. Usually they're like 45 minutes to an hour just to fill out the survey. And then you're going to collect and compile all of the data from the survey and then hopes to of finding some common themes where you get maybe two or three programs that you're gonna put together to combat the challenges that you've learned about on this survey. But wait, I thought only like a third of employees actually take and fill out employee surveys. If you get 40% of your employees to fill out an employee survey, you're probably doing pretty well. If you get higher than that, fantastic. But how many times have you filled out a survey only to wait four, five, six months or longer to see the results of the survey? Those are so many challenges to employee surveys. And there's a better way to do it, because think about it. Employee surveys are usually anonymous. So if you're only getting a third of your employees to fill out an anonymous survey, how do you Know if your top producers or your best employees or your engaged employees are actually the ones that are filling out the survey. If it's truly anonymous, you don't. So think about it. These surveys are anonymous. You're only getting a third of the employees to respond, and you're not even sure if you're engaged and top producers are even filling out the survey. In fact, usually the people that love filling these surveys out are the ones that want to complain about all the things that they don't like, and those traditionally are not the employees that you want to retain. So the responses come back bundled, they come back in groupthink, and therefore the solutions have to be put out that way. And no offense to hr, Human resources is usually the group that's driving the employee surveys, not the leaders. So what should organizations be doing instead? They should be doing stay interviews. And the reason that organizations should be doing stay interviews and conducted by the leaders is exactly that. They're conducted by the leader, where solutions can immediately be implemented. If you're not familiar with a stay interview, a stay interview consists of five questions, very simple, and it takes you roughly 15 or 20 minutes to conduct a stay interview. And the purpose of a stay interview is to identify ways to help engage the employee. It also helps with developing trust and psychological safety, which ultimately all lead to retaining your top talent. And when it comes to the four steps of connecting with employees to build deeper relationships, stay interview is just one of the four steps, but it's the most important of the four, because you will learn things that impact the employee and at the individual level. And, oh, by the way, you'll know who's saying it, so it's not anonymous. And more importantly, you'll get to hear from the top producers, you'll get to hear from those that you know that are engaged, and you'll be able to address the true challenges that you need to take on as an organization. So one day a few years ago, I was in the process of conducting stay interviews. And usually what I used to do was I would conduct four or five in a given day. And I gotta be honest, that's probably not the best way to do and conduct a stay interview because they do get long. You become very mechanical, robotic, and honestly, for me, I tune out, which is not a great thing to do. With that being said, in this particular day, I think I was on like, number four interview, and I knew the person coming in was a top producer, someone we had just recently promoted. This employee was a single mom who we had hired from the retail sales side of industry and really was performing very well. She was a great asset to the organization. So I knew that this day interview was going to be a very easy stay interview, but it also taught me a valuable lesson. So I fly through the first three questions and get to the fourth question, which essentially is, tell me the last time that you considered leaving the organization. So I mow through the question and I'm about ready to go to question number five. And you know, I'm taking notes on what she says. And her response to me blew me away. Her response was, clegg, I'm sorry, I'm actively considering leaving the organization today. I can't even tell you how I felt in that moment. My heart stopped, my stomach was in my throat, it was terrible. And I'm sure she saw that on my face and she apologized again. She's like, I'm so sorry, you know, I'm so happy and you guys have done so much for me. And I just looked at her, I was like, what? What's going on? I don't understand, like you have another job is something like what? Like, help me understand, please. And I could tell she was pretty emotional about this. And what she said was she goes, look, there's some things that have been going on that, you know, I was just embarrassed to talk about. And you have to understand that in her role, she was actually promoted into a client facing role. And so in that role, obviously she was responsible for taking care of our organization's clients and customers. And she said, you, Clegg, I've been working hard to, you know, save money and pay off debt and do all the things that young employees have to do. And she said, unfortunately, I just can't really afford client facing clothes. The clothes that I have just aren't professional enough to be out in front of clients. And I was just too embarrassed to tell you guys. And I just thought it would be easier just to quit and go back to my old job and doing things that I used to do. And I'm not gonna lie, there was a small bit of relief at that moment because my immediate response to her was, so if we can help you fix this, will you stay? And you know, emotionally, she said, yeah, of course I would. What are your thoughts? And so ultimately we decided immediately that we would get her a fifteen hundred dollar stitch fix subscription and she could go pick whatever clothes she wanted and then be ready to go. And so when you think about it, it was such a minimal cost to the organization and this was several years ago now. And the employee is still in a role. She's still kicking butt. She is a highly valued employee. And really, honestly, she's a great human being who's doing very well for her family. So if you think about the cost of $1,500 versus even selfishly from an organization standpoint, the revenue produced over a period of years, you're talking about thousands, hundreds of thousands, and potentially even millions to retain a valuable employee like that. And I know if I would not have conducted that stay interview, I would have not discovered that, and chances are we would have lost such a valued employee. I strongly, strongly urge you to drop the employee surveys and start conducting stay interviews and start conducting them right now because they're very simple and easy to do. I've learned more about my employees and the challenges that they've had in their personal lives and their professional lives, health wise. I mean, things that are often very uncomfortable to talk about. But you have to understand, employees bring their entire selves to work today. It's not like it was 20 or 30 years ago where likely our parents worked at one, maybe two places, got a gold watch, retired, and that was it. Those days are over. Those days are never coming back. So a stay interview is a great way to retain your top talent. If you're having great successes with employee surveys, don't stop doing them. Certainly keep doing them, but implement stay interviews alongside of it. I promise you it will be better served in your organizations. By doing that, remember, you're getting groupthink in employee surveys and you're getting programs that are delivered to an organization based on only a small sample size of employees. Even if it's greater than a third. Even if you only get half, what are the other half saying? So conduct stay interviews. Do them regularly, at least twice a year. I promise, I promise, I promise you won't be sorry. Because I've never heard an employee that said, well, hey, Clegg, I hate my boss, I hate my job. But you know what? I'm not going to quit. I'm going to stick around for that Starbucks gift card on an employee appreciation week. I've never heard that and I'm betting you have not either. So conduct stay interviews. They're very critical. Now this portion of the video is where we do our Q and A. We take the most popular questions that we get. We narrow it down to three of them that we conduct inside of these videos. The first question is, what if employees are hesitant to share their true feelings? And how do we create a more trusted environment so they're comfortable doing such. Honestly, this is the whole entire purpose of a stay interview is to help them get comfortable. Once an employee understands that the entire organization is committed to stay interviews and the tremendous value that come out of them, and more importantly, when they see that you immediately try and work on the challenges that they're having to provide solutions for them, they're going to easily jump on board to stay interviews and it's going start developing trust immediately. Now don't be surprised that the first time you do stay interviews, you're not finding tremendous information. That's okay, it can take time, but you're going to learn at least one or two things that you did not know going into these stay interviews that I commit to and I promise. And remember, stay interviews is just one of the four steps of connecting with employees to develop deeper relationships. And it's the most important of the four. But it's one of four. Our second question is, are stay interviews suitable for all sizes of organizations? And the answer is absolutely yes. Whether you have an organization of three employees or an organization that has 3,000 employees, as long as you have a leader that's conducting the stay interviews, not human resources. Once again, no offense hr, you are a great support mechanism, but that is how you should be used as a support piece of to leaders, not as the leader of the stay interviews. But as long as you have those leaders, stay interviews are absolutely critical and can be conducted across the entire organization. And I highly, highly, highly recommend that you do so regardless of the size of the organization. The third and final question is how do stay interviews contribute to the long term sustainability of retention and great cultures? And honestly, very similar to the first two questions, stay interviews are just a part of the process. As long as you're involved as the leader and adopting solutions based on the individual employees, it's highly sustainable. In fact, employees will be looking forward to the stay interviews. As you get used to doing stay interviews, it now opens up the feedback loop for employees to not wait until they get a stay interview to talk to you about things in your one on one or in your skip level meetings or in your breaking bread meetings, which are the other three meetings that drive connection to build deeper relationships with your employees. And remember in the story that I told you it only cost the company $1500 to help retain this employee who's tremendously valuable to the organization. So isn't that a minimal cost for high retention and to drive great culture? I think so. As usual, feel free to like, comment and share. We love getting feedback. We love getting messages from people that watch the videos. Make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel so that you can get all things leadership development.