Transforming Employee Satisfaction Surveys — “Resignations on the Rise? Not at My Company!”

It’s extremely rare to know a person who enjoys filling out an employee satisfaction survey, whether it’s daunting, boring, or just feels like it won’t make a noticeable difference during the time spent at the company.

Equally for leaders and People departments, it can be an intimidating task to review what comes back, have you ever wondered why? Let’s break it down — DJ hit the button.

Is My Survey Made of the Good Stuff? Or Is It Missing the Lamb Sauce?

Excuse the Hells Kitchen reference, but badly thought out questions are the sole reason an ESS is damaging the longevity of relationships between employers and employee’s, and equally the development of your internal growth. It correspondingly reflects back to individuals not wanting to fill them out too. It’s safe to say that the standard format of these surveys are outdated, and many People representatives refuse to stray away from their CIPD-backed methods of how these surveys should look. As times are changing, resignations are on the rise, and ambitious minds pave a new way of freedom-work, don’t you think the survey’s may be due to have a revamp?

One of the reasons why these survey’s are as useful as plastic cutlery is because the questions asked are deemed to be constructive when writing out the survey, but how many of you looked at the results afterwards and you (or the executives) thought “okay now what?”.

“Now what” indeed, and excessive time wasted trying to use that feedback to strategise an idea that has a high chance of being the wrong decision.

Breaking Down the Bad

Let’s break down some typical question’s asked at most companies these days that could mislead your strategy for improvement later down the line.

“Do you enjoy your company’s culture?” — This is a hard thinking question that can’t simply be answered with a yes or no, it also intimidates the employee to have to think about whether they’re satisfied or not, and often these really depend on the moment in time and whatever contributing factors are causing it. You could absolutely love your work culture depending on your mood, situation, the companies goals, or the environment you’re in, and there may be times where that culture really doesn’t help with your situation, whether it be due to stress, personal reasons, or anything else. Open ended questions are often bad too, we’ll get to that. But typically from questions like these, the answers vary so much it’s going to take someone forever to form a strategy out of it.

“Are you happy with the management?” — I’m going to hit you with a newsflash. This may sound controversial but managers ALWAYS need to find room for improvement — failing to accept that as a leader or People person will result in you suffering dire consequences that will poison the single most important part of your business (the people), remember that you can’t call yourself perfect at the same time as saying you’re self-aware. Firstly let’s look at how this question can be answered. Even if people were prompted to give definitive answers, often these answers have a chance of being blunt and would most likely boil down to a yes/no statistic, and if that were the case — what use was the question? If 50% of employees weren’t happy with the management, all you would have discovered is a meaningless statistic with nothing constructive to strategise, it’s pretty useless information in the grand scheme of things. The difference between a good and bad manager is a very complex, subjective and constantly changing… thing. A manager could turn their cheek and avoid confrontation with their under-performing team at the cost of the business, however a manager could also be knuckling down on their team to save the business and keep the results high. To each persons perspective they could be happy or frustrated with their manager. We need to rethink how we approach this question so that employees can give a better answer, therefore giving you numerous ways to develop your managers and show how/why it’s going to require action.

“Do you feel that your needs/values are met?” — My needs? My values? Gosh I really don’t know. Stand in front of a mirror and ask yourself that question and see if you know the answer right away, and if the answer is yes or no, can you explain why? Like right away? Can you easily explain which needs are/aren’t met? Though this is an extremely important and valuable question, it’s a perfect example of asking a difficult question that requires a lot of brain-time. Often when asking a question like this, if it takes too long to think about, you’re most likely going to get a blunt answer, especially from someone busy — which isn’t helpful to anyone. More importantly even with the employee being given a chance to speak about it, they’ll be resentful for being put in a position where it’s hard to give an answer. Values differ from person to person whether it’s reward, development, culture, or balance. This is a question that needs to be reconstructed in a way that actually asks you what your values are. Now let’s try again, if you look into the mirror and ask yourself ‘what are the top three things that you value at work?’, you’ll see how much quicker you answer. That’s an example of how a question can be reconstructed, stimulating the neurons to have a better direction of pulling out answers. The original question is like asking someone what destination they would like to go, but only giving them a compass, whereas the reconstructed question is more like giving them a map with a list of destinations.

Employee Satisfaction Surveys Need to Provide You With Statistics

One of the most powerful tools for strategy is being able to quantify your collected information and show it in statistical data. It allows you to clearly visualise trends, patterns, and problem areas. Yes, we already know that, so why is it rarely done with ESS’s? That’s because we’re often working with very open ended questions that limit our ability to categorise it. When you can categorise information, you can quantify it, to then turn it into a statistic. When you have statistics, arrangement possibilities are endless, you can arrange by dates & demographics, measure against previous changes, and visualise your trends. Open ended questions are great, they give employees a chance to speak openly and freely, but without a path you have no direction.

Example

If we go back to the question ‘What are the top three things you value at work?’, we can use this question to visualise the points made above. Below is an example of how the results could come back, and/or the keywords that can be taken from them to quantify your data.

Pay, progression, kindness, development, promotions, good management, diversity, opportunities, recognition, time-off, being valued, work/life balance, work socials, development, achievable goals.

A whole range of answers can be given, and you can start to see how much a ‘value’ can actually change from person to person. You can dot these words into a graph to see how many people value what, for example, 75% of people could value progression, and 50% could value diversity. A follow up question could then ask if these specific values are being met, and if the data is skewed towards no, you have the opportunity for a strategy.

Strategy you say…

Yes, strategy! Let’s say 100 people in a company of 150 said they value progression and 75 of them reckon the values are met below par. That’s half of your company who think progression isn’t great. The strategy could then be to put towards the progression framework. If you were to further break down the results into departments, or genders, or ethnicities, you can visualise the areas where its the worst and highest in priority to improve.

Oh go on then, one more example. 35% of people could value good management, of those, more than half could believe that management are poor, the strategy could be L&D for managers, or assessing if work is balanced from top to bottom, and potentially having a restructure to create more sub-teams. Endless ideas and strategies can be formed from how you best judge your own company.

What if I got a whole bunch of mixed words?
It might be a little extra work, but you can definitely categorise similar words together to fall into the same group, or link certain keywords to a different type of strategy — e.g. pay, money, compensation would all fall under the same category and link to the strategy where salaries need to be benchmarked and ‘annual salary review’ methods could be reassessed.

What Kind of Questions Will Stimulate The Mind?

What are the top 3 things I value at work?
You could put top 5 if you want, or you could list a large coverage of answers to choose from to help out with the thinking, and avoid having to group your keywords. A great follow up question to this would be:

Rate Each of Your Values on How Well They’re Being Met
This would then give you an idea of what’s not being met, and you can also leave room for further comments to allow people (who want to) to give a thorough answer to it.

What Characteristics of a Manager Do You Value?
Again like the above, you have a chance to give a large range of words and a chance to add in your own. Or let people freely give a few different ones. You can follow up with asking if these are met, or alternatively you can ask them to label which characteristics they don’t value in a manager. If it turns out that half of your managers lack communication, you can teach them ways to communicate better with their teams.

Out of 100, How Would You Say Your Work/Life Is Balanced on Average? e.g. 40/60.
This might seem like a weird or odd question to ask, but think about it, if you had the chance to be able to look at work/life balance as a number, and then filter between departments and seniorities. You can crack down on stress, demand, time-off, structure, and all sorts.

If I Was CEO, what would I change?
You may not be able to quantify results here, but I think this is a fantastic question which is different, and gives the person answering a chance to think of change ideas that don’t feel restricted or rejected. Imagining yourself as CEO really allows you to make the company your own when answering, and it truly brings out some fantastic ideas to which a good CEO will always like to look at as both feedback and ideas that comes from the heart of the company who work hard every day to keep things running.

Summary

This article was written to give the idea that we have an opportunity to think outside the box with our surveys, and find more ways to stimulate answers to achieve new results. We don’t have to scrap entire surveys and start again, but even changing a few areas to give us fresh results can be hugely impactful and also refreshing for those who answer it. The world is a beautifully diverse place and it should be embraced even more so in the questions we ask, so that we can create results that always give back to the people and save the loss of valuable staff. The guidelines above are just to the get the wheels rolling and plant the seed, but it is your ambitious mind which will take it to the moon, or not, the world is yours to do as you please, and maybe you’ll do just fine as you are.

Stay ambitious, yo.