Have you done an engagement survey in your workplace that suggests that you should find it easy to retain and attract excellent people, everyone should be happy at work, and results should be both excellent and sustained?
Yet, that doesn’t seem to translate to real world outcomes?
That’s because you are expecting the engagement survey to do something it can’t.
Let’s be clear. There is nothing wrong with engagement surveys. What they measure is useful. When they are well designed and credibly tested, they really do measure engagement.
The problem is that engagement surveys are often (we would even suggest usually) used to measure something they don’t. And can’t.
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Thanks for listening!
Speaker 1:
This is an audio blog. If you prefer to read it in its original text version, please visit reallearningcomau. Forward slash blog. Are your people highly engaged but leaving anyway? Have you done an engagement survey in your workplace that suggests you should find it easy to retain and attract excellent people, that everyone should be happy at work and that results should be both excellent and sustained? Yet that doesn't seem to translate to real world outcomes. That's because you're expecting the engagement survey to do something it can't.
Speaker 1:
Let's be clear. There is nothing wrong with engagement surveys. What they measure is useful. When they're well designed and incredibly tested, they really do measure engagement. The problem is that engagement surveys are often we would suggest even usually used to measure something they don't and can't. We get weekly calls from organizations in which frustrated leaders are using an engagement survey for the wrong purpose or assuming that the results tell them something they don't.
Speaker 1:
The biggest misconception we encounter is that engagement surveys and culture surveys or audits are the same thing. They categorically are not. Average managers hate to hear this. They're in a hurry to take a tick-and-flick approach, something that doesn't distract from the real work. Engagement surveys can be easy to implement and simple to unpack because they measure one aspect of the broader culture. Those same managers like to proudly and publicly point at the numbers from the engagement survey while privately scratching their heads and wondering why they aren't translating to genuine outcomes like retention, productivity, quality, sales volume and bottom line results.
Speaker 1:
Engagement and culture are related, but they're not the same thing and they can't be measured using the same tools. Great culture leads to high engagement, but the reverse is absolutely not true. We all know of organizations, industries and even sporting teams where highly engaged team members behave or have behaved in ways that are not aligned with the culture the organization is striving to create or with broader societal values. In those organizations and teams, people engage in destructive and immoral behaviors. They compete with each other, play politics and manipulate cheat, avoid dealing with issues, play it safe and avoid accountability. On an engagement survey, though, they would achieve a high score that could be benchmarked against other organizations and portrayed as proof of effectiveness.
Speaker 1:
When we measure and work on creating exceptional culture, we ask people to behave in a way that's aligned with strong values that will inevitably flow through to high engagement. If it doesn't, either you're misreading the behavioral alignment or the values need to be revisited. Engagement surveys require people to look at the workplace from an eye perspective. It's all about how they feel. Culture surveys and audits switch the perspective to we and ask people to think about what they actually do. Feeling individually good is lovely and produces short-term gains. Doing collective good is critical and underpins long-term excellence. If you're happy knowing how your people feel, go ahead and do that engagement survey. Just make sure it's a good one. But if you want to understand why they feel the way they do, align behaviors with both values and results and build a great culture by strategically addressing issues, talk to us about a culture audit.