Employee Surveys as Meaningful Metrics

Published: 2020-09-03

Photo Credit: Oleg Laptev, unsplash.com

Employee surveys are meaningful people metrics. Engage employees and empower teams to pursue your organization’s inspiring mission with compelling questions. Here’s what the research says…

1. Employee surveys, done well, are interventions for organizational change.

Surveys are interventions because questions are a powerful motivator⁵. Human brains are wired to respond to questions—when asked an important question, the entire brain gets active. A serotonin release encourages contributions from many areas of the brain, and new neuronal connections link ideas to create potential solutions. This energized quest in the brain creates motivation and readiness to act.

What transforms a survey into a catalyst for positive change? Have a vision and purpose for your survey. Think of a survey as an important conversation among organizational members and leaders. Create your survey with an intent to produce insights and a forward path.

When crafting your survey, consider who asks and who receives the responses, who responds, and how the information and results translate into action. Positive change comes from the questions asked (or not asked), and sends a message about what is important and worthy of curiosity. When you develop a survey to catalyze change, it creates meaningful dialogue, new thinking, and positive change¹⁰.

2. Aim surveys to include employee voice in impactful decisions.

Surveys are a way to understand what it’s like to belong to the organization and to gather ideas that will make the organization more fulfilling and effective. A well-designed survey (and a thoughtful analysis plan) informs leadership decisions with a rich and nuanced understanding of diverse perspectives within the organization, highlighting both alignment and differing views.

Researchers emphasize the importance of Employee Voice²⁷—leaders listening to understand employee perceptions. When employee voice is high, people feel like meaningful participants in the organization’s decisions. A meta-analysis on employee voice showed that when leaders listen, employees perform better at their jobs, show more creativity, and share more ideas. Surveys provide one invitation to be heard. Researchers point out that employee voice impacts job performance because it enables people to raise needs and concerns as well as gain support to achieve desired performance outcomes¹⁸.

3. Psychological safety is the foundation for honest, constructive survey responses.

A culture of psychological safety—where people feel safe to express opinions—allows a survey to produce meaningful metrics. A combination of psychological safety and effective survey methods yield honest, constructive responses. Leaders foster psychological safety by making it clear that all views are welcome and that discussion and shared understanding will only help improve the work experience.

Here is some guidance from research identifying common psychological risk cues. To bolster positive experiences and encourage meaningful survey responses⁸:

A culture of psychological safety is an important foundation. Even within that, surveys need to specifically promote safety. Experts have shared general guidelines for effective and psychologically safe surveys⁴:

1. Ensure that survey intentions are clear - what decisions will the survey influence?
2. Be transparent throughout the survey process - who will have access to results, how will they be used, what are you hoping to learn?
3. Develop best practices for handling data.
4. Choose partners who can help frame survey questions to benefit strong decision practices, promote psychological safety, help leaders openly accept diverse and even critical views, share results with teams and facilitate sensemaking, and support follow-up in actions and communications.
5. Use identified surveys (more on this in the next section).

4. Identified surveys are usually better than anonymous surveys.

Contrary to popular belief, employee surveys ideally should NOT be anonymous. Anonymity can be an enemy of psychological safety by reinforcing fears behind speaking up, and limiting responsive actions⁸. Identified surveys offer several benefits¹⁴:

The best practice—build trust with identified surveys. Experts urge leaders to rethink anonymity as the default for employee surveys¹⁵. Studies also show that identified surveys promote accountability and improve individual performance²⁸.

5. Meaningful Employee Survey Design.

Keep surveys focused

It’s valuable to capture outcome metrics like satisfaction and engagement, but remember to focus on actionable drivers. Ask questions that reveal experiences that are driving attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, and performance. To best discern the most relevant drivers:

• Do some pre-survey pilot work (e.g., focus groups) to consider possible factors that are having an impact in your organization
• To determine the best questions, find pairings of outcomes with contributing factors
• Keep ideas distinct so you can analyze potential relationships; avoid joining topics in single questions¹⁷

Focusing on specific, pre-identified drivers makes a survey relevant and delivers more actionable insight.

Use pre-built survey questions instead of writing your own

When asking about specific features of your organization, you may need custom-designed questions. However, if you are surveying employees on common constructs like “work engagement,” it is better to use tested measures. Tested measures bring you the benefit of valid questions derived with scientific rigor¹⁷. This means your results are more likely to represent something important that you can act on.

Note: The careful rewriting of a validated measure can suit an organization’s needs better than a generic question.

Write meaningful open-ended survey questions

Open-ended questions add value because they help explain ratings. Additionally, comments can help to validate survey constructs—they clarify a person’s understanding of the question being asked¹⁷.

However, researchers caution that when open-ended questions are vague and providing extra detail is optional, there is a strong negativity bias—people are more likely to choose to comment when they want to vent than to offer praise or appreciation²⁰.

Unfavorable perspectives are important, but can be problematic if they falsely appear to be the only perspectives, leading to unwarranted corrective action that can backfire with unintended consequences.

To ensure a more balanced collective voice, craft meaningful forward-looking questions that engage all respondents (including the happy ones). Consider requiring responses for open-ended items to gather detailed feedback from both satisfied and dissatisfied employees.

Know your organization’s pulse

Pulse surveys have gained in popularity (e.g., the Employee Net Promoter Score) as a way to more frequently assess important employee experiences, attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, and outcomes²⁷. Taking action matters¹¹, and frequent measures that spotlight change over time can support a feedback loop connecting actions to outcomes.

Whether you create your questions or use pre-built tests, the metric is not as important as the actions taken with the data. An ongoing pulse survey can maintain a baseline understanding of the organization. This type of survey gauges employee perception and shows changes to employee perception over time. Leaders gain insights as to when and why changes in employee perceptions occur. Research supports the pulse measures that generate valid results using a single, repeated question²¹.

6. Overcome resistance to surveys.

One study found that 47% of employees think the results of surveys stay flat over time (i.e., no changes). Another study found that the “Nothing ever changes around here” attitude is two times more potent than fear in creating resistance to survey participation¹². Employees need to trust that survey responses will influence leaders’ decision-making to feel open to sharing meaningful responses.

The key reason employees withhold ideas and concerns originates from beliefs that leaders will not act⁸. To earn employees’ respect for surveys, take actions based on results, thus showing people that their responses matter³⁰. Decision-making research supports leaders in taking data into account when making important calls such as those that impact employee experience and culture. While gut-based, intuitive decisions are faster, the most effective decision-making incorporates data and logical reasoning⁶.

Digital solutions and artificial intelligence (AI) have become more prevalent to support surveys, experts issue some cautionary notes about transparency and suggest adopting practices that ensure AI is used to promote legal, ethical, and robust survey goals and methods¹⁹.

7. Make meaningful adaptive moves with survey results.

Hidden information in employee surveys can provide additional insight.

According to a meta-analysis, the average survey response rate for general populations is about 50%, but only about 35% for employee surveys². For employee surveys, “too busy,” is the top reason for no response.

While “too busy” likely has truth, other variables also impact response. Recent studies found that gender, and cultural values sway response likelihoods¹⁶. Proactively engaging team members and learning why non-response occurs will foster more meaningful and representative results from a survey.

Research on non-responders classifies two groups; active and passive non-responders. A passive non-responder is fully willing to take a survey, but skips it for some reason (e.g., “too busy”). Passive non-responders tend to rate the same in terms of job satisfaction and related metrics as the survey responders.

The second type of non-responder is an active non-responder, an employee who refuses to participate in the survey. Active non-responders generally have low job satisfaction, high intentions to quit, and dissatisfaction with management. Results suggest that active non-responders present as less agreeable and conscientious than those who were willing to take the survey^22,23.

The preferred method for learning about who’s not responding to your survey (and who’s passive and who’s active) is switching from anonymous to identified surveys and then following up* with non-responders personally (see below)²⁴.

8. Share the survey results with everybody, but be thoughtful about how you do it.

An employee survey launch is not complete until you share the survey feedback with organizational members who were invited to contribute, and determine actions springing from the input²⁶.

Sharing survey results, insights, and actions is an important next step in aiming your survey as a powerful intervention for change. The resulting sense of involvement from being asked for input, learning the input given by all respondents, and participating in determining next steps creates forward momentum for tangible, positive change¹³.

Science-backed tips for sharing survey feedback effectively:

1. Ideally, have leaders present results instead of HR or consultants.
2. Talk about the results in person.
3. Think beyond a single presentation to everyone — look at strategies to discuss in smaller groups, or consider a presentation followed by team-level discussions.
4. Present the most unit-relevant results first. People are more likely to feel engaged when focusing on feedback that directly concerns them.
5. Point to actions that are already underway in response to the survey. These links are not always known or obvious beyond those directly involved¹³.

9. Improve organizational effectiveness; act on employee attitudes and feedback.

Successful organizations invest in listening to employee voice, and it pays off. Organizations with highly satisfied employees have higher revenues, lower costs, better employee retention, and stronger customer loyalty. Studies have found that companies that invest extra resources in people measurement beat the S&P 500 index in earnings by as much as 35%⁹, companies ranked in the “100 Best Companies to Work For” are more profitable than less people-friendly companies, and tracking job satisfaction can improve employee retention rates by 20%³.

If your primary expense is people, then people are also a powerful lever for raising profits²⁵. Leaders who listen, tap into insights gained through employee voice data, and take action on what they learn amplify employee success and effectiveness. A conservative estimate suggests that a 5% increase in productivity can boost profits by 50%¹—and an employee survey may be the intervention needed to start that growth.