Employee surveys

The topic of employee surveys is always controversial. Management wants to hear employees’ opinions, and employees want to do the right thing but are afraid their answers cannot be tracked. If you have read this blog, you know that I am always thinking about corporate culture. This is partly because employees who trust the leadership team can create a more cohesive, fun, and effective workplace. 

Can management track employee survey results at the individual level? As an employee, should I be afraid of retaliation? Simply put, employees should not be afraid.

I have been involved in these surveys for over 15 years. In my role, I have helped create them, purchased them, and tried to encourage employee participation with employee surveys. I am here to tell you that in all my years around these surveys, I have never seen or heard of management being able to track individual responses. This week, I explain why employees should not fear the employee satisfaction survey.

Multiple employee fears:

• Big Brother watches over the employee and can trace the answers to the individual.
• Comments and writing styles can be interpreted and traced back to the individual.
• Leadership will hold grudges against departments, and managers will hold grudges against individuals.

Ohhhh, the paranoia and mistrust.

The goal of this post is three-fold:

1. Dispell the myths that individual answers are read, tracked, and hunted down.
2. Provide the business logic behind why a company would NOT (and should not) track individual answers.
3. Explain why employees SHOULD all participate in these surveys.

Why so little participation?

I understand why many companies end up with low participation in employee surveys. In some companies, the leadership or the HR department sends out a single email with a link to the study. The company will give the survey every 20 seconds of airplay during the company meeting. We shouldn’t expect much from a 20-second blub.  

Leadership should dedicate real-time to explaining why and how the results of these surveys can make a difference. If an unfamiliar list of questions arrives in my inbox, I will get suspicious on a good day. Catch me on a bad day, and I will get downright pissy. Unfamiliar website links will make me suspicious and make me think there is a virus, bot, or spam in my inbox. We tell our children not to talk to strangers driving windowless vans and tell employees not to click on suspicious-looking links. Can you blame me for not participating?

3 different times, three different ways

Employees need to understand why taking a few minutes out of their day to answer survey questions can make a difference. Employee surveys should be explained three times in three different ways. If I receive the message via email, hear the message from the company leader, and hear the message from my manager, I will start to understand that this is important.

Employee surveys SHOULD BE (and usually are) conducted by an outside third party to add credibility and protect anonymity. Hence, the link to the unfamiliar website. The goal of collecting this information is NOT so companies can comb through responses and find out who has a negative attitude. Seriously, no one has the time to sift through the answers. The goal of the surveys is two-fold:

1. Figure out what changes the leadership should make to IMPROVE the workplace.
2. Figure out what employees like and where leadership should NOT make changes. Employees do appreciate the company picnic!

Best Place to Work lists

Are often made via employee surveys. An outside third party will survey the company’s employees in many areas. A few are listed below. The companies with the best results and the most participation make the list.

Best Place to Work categories, which are judged

• Management transparency: the amount of information management shares with the company. Does management share the vision of the company or explain the financials?
• Benefits: Are the employer’s benefits competitive with those of companies of similar size in the local area and industry?
• Training and Development: Is the company investing in the employee force with employee training?
• Vacation: Is the vacation policy competitive with other companies in the industry?
• Career: Is your manager helping you grow your career?

High-scoring companies are then sent an in-depth questionnaire that details the company. Companies with the best answers make the list.

Making the list helps in the following ways:

• It’s always good when an outside third party validates to the employees that the company is a great place to work. This reinforces to the employee that the company is a good workplace and helps with retention. Employees have bragging rights, and they can flaunt to their peers, which helps with employee referrals.
• Smart candidates will search out the companies that make these lists and apply to these companies before applying to companies that do not make the list.
• Internally, making the list becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. When an outside third party tells employees they are working for the Best workplace, they take pride in the company, the building, who they hire, and their work ethic.
• The Best Place to Work logo is listed on business cards and in email signatures as a subtle reminder to employees and a marketing tool for potential recruits and customers. This logo legitimizes the business.

Need 100% participation

In talking to my HR peers, I noticed some had difficulty making these lists because the employees did not want to complete the survey. These peers work in companies with all the characteristics of a Best Place to Work, but they are missing the employee participation in the survey. The employer must have close to 100% of employees participating in the survey to make these lists.

Right or wrong, low participation in an employee survey is interpreted to mean the employee force isn’t engaged, doesn’t care, or has nothing good to say.

This assumption makes sense. You will not have low participation when employees are engaged and are proud of where they work. Suppose the management team explains how filling out the survey helps the business. Why wouldn’t an engaged workforce that believes they have a great company help with marketing, recruiting, and making the company even better?

Aggregate-level survey results are shared with the management team, and this information is very valuable. The results can help leadership FIX and improve any shortcomings in the corporate culture, benefits, vacation policy, etc.

I have never seen individual names attached to survey results or individual comments.

Debunking the myths:

As an HR professional, I do NOT want to ask employees to participate in a survey that can be tracked to the individual level. If a manager wants to identify individual comments, then go mid-evil on them and cut out their tongues. If they need individual-level feedback, they probably will not be able to keep it quiet. We are focusing on the wrong thing. I WANT the data to be anonymous for the following reasons:

We want the truth

The company knows they will NOT receive honest feedback if the answers are personally identifiable. The information will be what the managers WANT to hear and not what the managers NEED to hear. 

Too much risk

There is too much risk at stake. Who knows where this information could land or how it could be interpreted? I would vote with my job if I thought this information would be tracked to the individual level. HR would be useless in this non-trusting and suspicious environment. Yes, I really would have to find another place to work. Within a profession that already has a bad rep, no one would trust HR. No one would trust management, and who wants to work in that environment?

Focus on the forest, not the individual tree

Data is the most effective at the aggregate level. Whether we have 50, 100, or 100,000 comments, focusing on one or two negative (or positive) outliers is avoiding focus on the real issues. Leadership must accept that we will not please everyone on all dimensions surveyed. There will ALWAYS be someone who doesn’t appreciate everything or misinterprets the questions in the literal sense and doesn’t see the big picture. There will always be a “worst” score; if we solve that worst score, the next worst score will take its place.

Working in HR, I have talked with the people responsible for these surveys. I know of more than one company subpoenaed for individual information. These companies could not produce it because it didn’t exist. (FYI, Suing your employer is not the way to remain anonymous in an employee survey, folks)

Vendors get a bad rap 

No vendor administers surveys and wants their results to be trackable at the individual level. If the word got out that the third party administering the employee survey shares individual comments and results with management, we would hear about it. Glassdoor, Reddit, and TechCrunch would be spreading the gossip like wildfire. 

Consider the downside for management and the survey provider. It just isn’t worth it. Companies spend a LOT of money to run these surveys, and it isn’t to ferret out any individual employees.

Next week’s post: what leadership can do to reduce paranoia around employee surveys. 

See you at the after party,
HRNasty

nasty: an unreal maneuver of incredible technique, something that is ridiculously good, tricky, and manipulative but with a result that can’t help but be admired, a phrase used to describe someone good at something. “He has a nasty forkball”.

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