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The point of an employee engagement survey is to actually improve employee engagement. The goal is not to survey our employees, find out that they’re unhappy, and then say, “Oh well, nothing we can do about it.” Without serious action and communication, an employee engagement survey is, at best, a waste of time.
One of the essential action and communication steps that must be taken immediately after an engagement survey is closing the loop with employees and showing them the survey results. And ideally, this is done via department managers (those leaders who are closest to the employees who took the survey).
Unfortunately, this is not happening nearly as frequently as it should be.
More than 10,000 HR executives have taken the online test “How Good Is Your Employee Engagement Survey?” One of the questions asks, “Do all of your department managers (or equivalent) share their area's survey results with the employees in that area?” and gives the following four choices for answering the question:
- All of the managers share the area results with their employees.
- Most of the managers share the area results with their employees.
- A few of the managers share the area results with their employees.
- None of the managers share the area results with their employees.
Clearly, only choice #1 is a really good answer. But as you can see in the chart below, only 29% of companies say that ‘All of the managers share the area results with their employees.’
Data from the test “How Good Is Your Employee Engagement Survey?”
What are the chances that employees will just take it on faith that the responses they gave on the survey will be taken seriously, prioritized, and acted upon? Employee faith is in short supply these days, so those chances are virtually nonexistent. Thus it falls to leaders to make sure that they go back to the employees (i.e. the people who filled out the survey) and candidly communicate exactly what strengths and opportunities were discovered in the survey.
And as the question on this online test notes, it’s not just the organization-wide results that need to be shared, it’s the results for that particular department (or workgroup, business unit, etc.). It’s quite common for a company to have high engagement scores overall but still have specific areas in serious need of improvement. And if we’re unwilling to really dig deep and tackle the specific issues facing employees, it’s as though we haven’t any results at all.
When you survey employees, you’re essentially making a promise to do something about those issues. If you survey employees about whether they’re getting enough opportunities to develop their career, you’re implicitly promising that you will fix that issue. If you survey employees about whether they think the company’s strategy makes sense, you’re implicitly promising that you will fix that issue.
Here’s the warning: If you survey employees but don’t actually tackle any of the issues that they said need addressing, then you’ve broken a promise to them. And that’s worse, frankly, than not having conducted a survey in the first place.
When the data shows that in 50% of companies either a few of the managers or none of the managers share the area results with their employees, we know that a lot of companies are breaking their implied promise to employees.
Even the 21% of companies reporting that most of the managers share the area results with their employees are potentially in trouble. Because while there are a good number of managers at these companies that share the survey results, ask yourself this question: ‘Which managers are more likely to share their results, those with really high engagement scores or those with low scores?’
Of course, managers with really high engagement scores are far more likely to share their results with employees than are the managers whose scores were depressingly low. And the problem is that the managers with the lowest scores are the ones who really need to courageously sit down with their employees and candidly discuss the root causes of those low scores.
In the study “Disengaged Employees Are More Motivated Than You Think,” we discovered that 26% of employees are Motivated But Unhappy. This means that while they’re motivated to give their best effort at work, they really don’t like their company. And one of the big reasons they don’t like their company is that they don’t believe their leader encourages and recognizes suggestions for improvement.
It’s likely that these people have good suggestions for improvement, and they’re probably excited to share them. But if their suggestions are ignored, diminished, or generally unwelcome, their employee engagement will suffer. Ironically, employee engagement surveys are one of the most direct ways to solicit employees’ suggestions for improvement. And if we don’t even bother to close the loop and report back on the findings of the survey, we’ve very blatantly told them “We will neither encourage nor recognize your suggestions for improvement.”
