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Does your employee survey consist of just a list of statements, an agree/disagree scale and virtually nothing else? If so, you are missing a big opportunity. For some reason, this particular question technique has taken hold in the employee research world, sometimes to the exclusion of other, often superior, research techniques.
The preoccupation with this type of survey is unfortunate, since there are many things that, in my view, should be part of a well-constructed employee survey that cannot be forced in to the agree/disagree format. For example, this type of question is very ineffective at measuring behaviors (what staff do) and motivations (why they do it) and at identifying issues that management needs to address (rather than the attitudinal symptoms of these issues). It is also very poor at prioritizing research findings, such as why you should regard one attitude to be more important than another.
The internal communication function is served particularly poorly by such surveys. Often, this highly complex aspect of the business is reduced to somewhat bland statements like: “My information needs are well met,” “My manager and I communicate effectively with each other,” “Communications are good in this company” and “We receive information in a timely manner.”
These questions may provide reassurance if the responses are positive, but you have no idea what specific issues need to be addressed if responses are negative. For example, when staff disagree with the statement: “Communications are good in this company,” other questions arise: Is the issue that little communication appears to happen, or that it happens but is not believed, or that it comes via the wrong channels, or that it is delivered too late? Generalized statements fail to recognize all these aspects and are of little help in pinpointing an employee’s needs.
Some of the worst examples of agree/disagree statements come from consultancies that have defaulted to using a standardized set of questions. Because the statements have to be phrased so that they make sense in any organization, they may end up making little sense in your particular organization.
The way in which employee surveys are conducted needs to be reconsidered. Surveys that consist mostly of agree/disagree statements severely short-change clients. They ask too many wrong questions, and provide results that often can’t be acted on and normative measures that frequently focus on the wrong issues.
Many employee research briefs focus on understanding and improving employee engagement. This is a complex notion. It should embrace how people engage with every aspect of the organization: its management, internal systems and communication; its values, vision and mission; its customers and other stakeholders; and employees’ own personal values and needs that they seek to fulfill at work. In that respect, every question in the questionnaire should give you some insight into the nature of employee engagement. On their own, agree/disagree scale questions cannot provide the entire picture because there are important facets of engagement that they are unable to measure. Too often the notion of employee engagement has been hijacked to provide spurious credibility to a poor set of measures.
The best employee surveys are ones that start with your organization’s business plan and success model, and the strategies (HR, internal communication, etc.) that are designed to support them. They need to use the full range of questioning techniques available to researchers and should be action-oriented. While a few agree/disagree scale questions can be helpful, surveys that consist solely or mainly of such questions omit many of the most important issues that employees should be asked about.
Peter Hutton is founder and managing director of BrandEnergy Research Ltd. and author of What Are Your Staff Trying to Tell You? Revealing Best and Worst Practice in Employee Surveys, published by Lulu.com. |
