Mark Murphy argues that employee engagement surveys often ask questions companies can't act on, eroding trust instead of building it. Only 28% of HR executives say their survey questions point to clear actions. A better approach: ask only what you'd actually fix if the answer came back low.
Some of the most popular employee engagement survey questions are absolutely useless, and they're actually really annoying your employees. As a general rule, never ask an employee engagement survey question you do not know how to fix. Hi, I'm Mark Murphy, founder of Leadership IQ, and let's get into this. The purpose of an employee engagement survey is to increase employee engagement. The purpose is not to idly measure, satisfy executives' curiosity, or establish a baseline. If an employee engagement survey is not designed to help us increase engagement, we risk violating employees' trust and actually decreasing their engagement. Think of it like this: people take time out of their day to answer a survey. They do so with the expectation and an implied promise that something will improve. But if months go by with no significant action taken, they're going to feel like the company broke that implied promise. Most companies don't start their survey with the intention of not taking action on the results, but that's a typical outcome because the survey questions most companies ask are too vague or lack a specific path to action. In fact, a LeadershipIQ study of HR executives found that Only 28% of HR execs say that every single question on their survey is a clear path to action. That is, they never struggle to figure out which actions to take. Now, some people are going to assert that their questions don't suffer from this problem, but let's look at some popular survey questions. I have confidence in this company's leaders. I trust my direct leader. I like my direct leader. I have great friends at work. My boss cares about me as a person. Those questions seem innocuous enough until we ask the question, what specific actions would we take if we received a low score on those questions? Imagine you get low scores on the question, I have confidence in this company's leaders. What specific actions will you take to ameliorate this issue? Should leaders communicate more or less? Should leaders communicate with a more directive and assertive style or take a more diplomatic approach? The simple fact is you don't know. Any or all of those strategies might work, but they might also be the exact wrong approach for your unique group of employees. And the reason you have no idea which would be the correct approach is that the survey question did not have a path to action. The vast majority of questions containing words like Trust, confidence, satisfied, and care are so vague and lacking a path to action as to be utterly useless. By contrast, take the question, "I understand the rationale behind the company's business decisions, for example, the economy, business, and competitors." Research shows that this is one of the top statistical drivers of employee engagement. It has a very clear path to action. If you discover your employees do not understand the rationale behind the company's business decisions, You now know exactly what you're supposed to do. A quick bit of training or teaching the employees the rationale behind your major business decision strategies, and voilà, you've just solved this problem and increased employee engagement. You should apply a simple test to every single question on your survey. Read each question and then ask yourself, what specific actions would we take If we received a low score on those questions, if you find you either don't know what you would do or you got too many equally plausible ideas, then you need to fix that question. Let's take the question, I trust my direct leader. If you got a low score on that question, what specific actions would you take to correct that problem? Team building could work, sure, but only for employees with a high affiliation drive. Otherwise, could contrived team building is going to damage the leader's credibility. Leaders could employ a more participative style, but that's going to fail with employees that are negative, withdrawn, or highly introverted. So hopefully you can see the problem here. There are so many possible actions, each with pluses and potentially huge minuses, that it's impossible to know the correct choice. So you would either need to rewrite the question or just you know, kill it off entirely. If you don't know what specific actions you should take to address every single question on your survey, you will not see real improvement. And without a path to improvement, I gotta be honest here, there's not a lot of point in conducting a survey. If you are, however, ready for an employee engagement survey that drives real improvement because every question has a clear path to action, Check out the Employee Engagement Survey at leadershipiq.com. You're going to be shocked at how quickly employee engagement improves when you actually ask actionable questions.
