Engagement Surveys — Kill it with fire!
By: Brittany Canty
Tags: HR, Engagement Survey, Staff Engagement Survey, Startup

Let me ask you a question.

If I’m a Black Women (which I am), and you ask me “Are you happy at the company you work at?” and I say “Yes”, do you think you can then make the claim that my company is great for Black Women?

Uh…..

The answer is NO. Because that’s not the question that you asked. And this, in short, is why Engagement surveys must burn!

So let me take a step back, get off my soapbox, and give some context as to why I feel so strongly about the death of engagement surveys.

Regardless of the intentions of engagement surveys, (which I do believe are anchored in trying to make improvements), it’s questions like the one above that turn a potentially promising mechanism into a propaganda tool. Having taken a fair amount of engagement surveys in my time, there are more examples like the question and “insight” shown above than I would care to say. The honest truth is that because of that truth, employees don’t believe in engagement surveys, and employees don’t trust them so therefore they are useless.

What’s inherently wrong with Engagement Surveys?

It’s the wrong mechanism for the desired outcome. The reason why — because it lacks context.

There’s a reason why when Product Managers need to get feedback we think about what type of feedback we need because not all feedback is created equal. There are times where surveys work — let’s say if you need some directional support ie. How many people want feature A?

But surveys DON’T work, if you need specific information or context, like WHY a person might want feature A, or how might they imagine using feature A. Those questions are best answered with interviews or focus groups, because you need to actually talk to the customers, and more importantly be able to probe deeper on specific answers to understand the why, or the motivations behind the answers.

And this brings me back to engagement surveys, the type of feedback that they are trying to capture, in general, is not made for surveys. There are some objective data like race, gender, did you get promoted, etc that work for surveys. Things that don’t change depending on how you feel that day.

But questions like “Do you feel valued by your boss” that’s a crazy loaded question! Honest answer, it depends on the day. Depends on the week, my workload, if I went on vacation, if I had to work through lunch and a dozen other variables that may have influenced my answer at that precise moment that my boss reminded me to take this stupid survey.

Ok… so I might have gotten back up on that soapbox. Let’s get back down for a sec.

How did we get here?

Honestly, because some company convinced another company that this “tool” was a better and more efficient way to understand their employees. But to employees, it seems like these “tools” have gotten in the way of the true intention of the desired outcome. Just like “performance reviews”- engagement surveys aren’t working, not sure if they ever truly worked.

The solution is simple. Talk to your employees… actually talk to them. Ask them questions, follow up to the answers, and then repeat back what you heard (aka active listening).

AND THEN, make changes right away based on what was heard. And if you do this on an ongoing basis not only would you get a better ROI on the effort, but you are also building relationships with your employees in an active way, and not a fake hands-off way.

It’s what we in the PM space call having a short feedback loop. The more often you talk to customers, the more aware you are of their problems, the quicker you can address them and the more willing they are to continue to give you their money, or in the case of employees their expertise.

If you take care of them, they’ll take care of you.