Have you ever had your team fill out an engagement survey that didn't have the outcome you were hoping for? Join us, as we unravel the complex world of employee engagement surveys, exploring the challenges of creating a secure space for honest feedback that can actually lead to impactful change. We stir the conversation around the illusion of anonymity, and how it shapes responses, especially from those in positions of less power.
If you want your employee engagement surveys to get honest answers, and lead to real, meaningful change, you'll need to hear this!
To have your questions answered on the show, submit your story here: https://allthrive.ca/share-your-story
Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink is live every week at 5:00pm MST. Please join us to get answers to your leadership questions! https://www.linkedin.com/in/leah-fink-all-thrive/
Have you ever had your team fill out an engagement survey that didn't have the outcome you were hoping for? Join us, as we unravel the complex world of employee engagement surveys, exploring the challenges of creating a secure space for honest feedback that can actually lead to impactful change. We stir the conversation around the illusion of anonymity, and how it shapes responses, especially from those in positions of less power.
If you want your employee engagement surveys to get honest answers, and lead to real, meaningful change, you'll need to hear this!
To have your questions answered on the show, submit your story here: https://allthrive.ca/share-your-story
Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink is live every week at 5:00pm MST. Please join us to get answers to your leadership questions! https://www.linkedin.com/in/leah-fink-all-thrive/
Speaker 1:
Every action you take as a leader has a ripple effect, starting with your team, going out to the organization and even out into people's personal lives. Here we offer you the chance to learn from real life stories of leadership so you can gain a deeper understanding and level up your own skills From communication to culture, to power and equity, to feedback, to resolving conflict and more. Join us and make sure you're creating the ripples you want. Welcome to Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink.
Speaker 2:
Now today we are going to be talking about employee engagement surveys and you might have a reaction to that already. You might be going yeah, those things, or maybe you really like them. You've had some great experiences. We're going to break that down a little bit today, because they can be fairly complex. They can be done very well or not as well, and then they don't have that impact that we're hoping for. Jp writes to us.
Speaker 2:
I work on a smaller team in a large corporation and we did an employee engagement survey a couple months ago. The feedback was supposed to be anonymous, but no one believed that Our team is small enough. There's no way to make the data truly anonymous, so it feels like if anyone said anything critical, higher levels of leadership would know it was them. One of my staff asked me if there was a point in saying anything. Or do they try to make their answers neutral and just accept that things aren't going to change? I told them that it was probably better to not rock the boat. I think what they would bring up would be important for management to hear, but I really didn't think it was worth the risk to them. Now, months later, we have the same problems and I kind of regret not raising more in the survey or telling them to raise anything. What else could I have done? First of all, thank you for sharing your question, jp, and it sounds like you're in a tough space, you and your employees that a lot of people have been in. I have heard many horror stories about engagement surveys. The first thing I want to say to anyone in your situation is that you shouldn't feel too much shame or worry about maybe not giving perfect feedback. We've talked before, in the first episode even, about the vulnerability that you feel when you are in a position with less power. If you are an employee, it sounds like you, jp, are some sort of frontline leadership. There are people above you who might have an influence over your job, and you choosing in that moment to say it doesn't feel safe to provide this information is not a downfall or a failing of yours at all. It means that at some point you have figured out a strategy in those kinds of roles to keep yourself safe, to keep your job secure, because you need to feed your family. That's not a bad thing.
Speaker 2:
What we want to talk about with this episode is some of the ways that we can take away those pieces from the culture, from the organization, and so JP and his team are able to share that kind of information. One thing I want to say is it sounds like JP himself has done a good job of earning some trust, at least with that one team member maybe with more, because they chose to come to him and ask that question. I see this a lot in organizations is you can have healthy culture, less healthy culture, but you, of course, will have pockets of people who have stronger, weaker relationships. If your organizational culture is maybe not great and you're thinking of an employee engagement survey for the whole organization, you might get vastly different results and vastly different honesty based on which department and who's running it. In JP's case, he's got some trust with the staff. They're willing to come forward with this further on the organization and maybe higher up there might not be that safety.
Speaker 2:
This is one of the first reasons, though, that we need to talk about that employee engagement surveys don't always lead to the results that we hope. That is, that staff don't fill them in honestly. As you heard in JP's example, they didn't end up choosing to move forward with some of that more honest critical feedback. I'm going to guess, as we say that, once again, I don't want to put the accountability for that on staff. The accountability for that actually needs to be on leadership and the organization. Have you created truly a space where staff are able to be honest without fear of repercussion? They know that that feedback will do something, that it will actually be helpful, and we'll talk more about that in this episode but have you really created that kind of space, or are you expecting that staff be honest with you and place trust in you that maybe you haven't earned yet?
Speaker 2:
Now, of course, this can be a bit of a catch-22, because the reason an organization or a leader might be getting staff to fill out an engagement survey is they recognize that maybe things aren't perfect. They'd like to get more information about that, so they've asked staff to fill out the survey, and staff aren't willing to fill out that survey because they don't have that security, and so it can be a little bit of a difficult situation to navigate, which is one of the reasons we're talking about it today is because of this, this complication, and the reality is too. Though, if you never create this safety for employees to engage in this healthy, honest way, all that's going to happen is you're going to lose your employees because they won't talk about the challenges they're having, and you're probably going to end up with them on Glassdoor or another review site leaving bad reviews about your organization now that it's truly anonymous and feel safe because they aren't affected by any of that anymore. Now, of course, as we talk about this, ultimately these surveys, this engagement, is about getting feedback from your employees, and I love feedback. I'm a huge proponent of it. It's a big part of my work and it is obviously much more complicated than just these surveys, than just today's episode. We will be committing an episode very soon and, I'm sure, lots of other future episodes to feedback, because it's such a big, important topic and the ideal that we're getting towards is that you can have individual, one-on-one live feedback with people that will share this information with you, because we do have that kind of culture, because it is so safe and easy for them to share. But that is definitely an ideal. It takes a lot, a lot of work and trust to get to that space. So if you're not there yet, that's okay. We're starting with this and we'll go from there.
Speaker 2:
As you start to look at this survey and this first piece, I would highly recommend that you do have someone external to your organization most companies do this who is going to be collecting this data, doing the survey, and I would even recommend that we start looking at other ways that you can help employees feel safe. So, if we have a written survey, there's only so many people on the team, everyone's got a distinct voice. There can be things like having your your consultant actually do some of the anonymizing for you, taking a whole series of voices and putting them together. In addition to the survey, you might have one-on-one interviews or small focus groups. These are things I'd employ quite a bit to really get that staff experience in a way that is safer and more anonymous than sending in something to their boss. I've even had horror stories of people telling me about previous companies they worked in where, if you put your feedback into the computer system, the person who was running the survey tracked IP addresses, so they would never be anonymous, and so there's a couple different things you need to look at. Of what might your employees be thinking about their own safety with what they're going to share through a survey, and there might be other opportunities to have someone else who is neutral who can protect them to help make that more anonymous.
Speaker 2:
Now, of course, though this leads to, the next challenge with engagement surveys is that they are anonymous. So if we haven't gotten to this point yet where we're having these conversations in person, one-on-one, we can actually bring them up. In the moment, we're relying on this survey. It's anonymous. It leaves so little space for us to create clarity. I've had multiple times that I've heard or looked in a survey, and you see that maybe communication is ranked quite low, and people will even make comments about challenges they've had with communication inside the organization.
Speaker 2:
Communication is really big and vast, and often the feedback in order for people to try to remain anonymous isn't as specific as it could be. So now what we have is this feedback and it's some information, and if you remember last week, when we talked about the ladder of inference and making assumptions, when we only have so much information, we automatically are, of course, going to make assumptions about it. So we have all this data we collected. That's the bottom, and we start picking the data that seems relevant to us and assigning our meaning to it. So with communication do we mean, oh, maybe email communication, or maybe we mean communication in meetings, or maybe we mean the structure around communication. I'm going to now choose, as a leader, or as maybe an executive team or leadership team, what I think the most relevant data is.
Speaker 2:
And because it's anonymous, I can't go check back with my staff and say, hey, you left a comment about XYZ communication. I would like to know more about that. Could you clarify for me what you're hoping for with this or what the challenge really is, or what you see the solution is being? And in the long run, like I said, that's what we want to get to. That is where we can get to, but we want to be really careful before we have that information that we're not just piling assumptions on top. One of the things we can do is bring that back to our staff team to talk to our team and say, hey, we've gotten a couple different pieces of feedback about communication. As we move forward, we want to make sure we're really clear. Will people share what was meant or could anyone expand on these ideas? It may or may not work once again, depending on the safety if it's the boss versus maybe an external support, because those people might think as soon as I say or contribute to this discussion, I will no longer be anonymous and I'll lose that sense of safety.
Speaker 2:
So now we have this survey, which may or may not come from a place of honesty, depending on how safe it was. We've got some information, but maybe not a fully clarified piece of information about what we want to do. And then the biggest piece, of course, is what are we doing with this information and how are we communicating it? And I've once again heard many stories about people probably the most common being people put in effort to fill out an engagement survey. They actually put in time some thought, maybe they even gave some honest feedback, and then they heard nothing, nothing from leadership about what was happening, nothing from management, nothing from their supervisor. They just put this information out, put an effort and we're returned with no result. So by the time the next staff survey comes around, they're going to go. Why would I bother? And I hear leaders saying oh, my team just doesn't want to engage with these, they're so tired of filling out these surveys. And of course, wouldn't you be tired if you put effort into filling something out and then you never heard anything back from it, you never saw a result from it? Or the opposite is sometimes we get so caught up in this process of trying to manage and interpret this information that's not quite clear that leaders will make a decision based on their assumptions.
Speaker 2:
Right Assumptions lead to our actions and they will provide something that no one asked for. Right Staff all said that they had a poor work-life balance, and so the leadership team decided to provide a weekly pizza party. The staff are all sitting here going. We didn't want a pizza party. There were so many other things that we were hoping for with those comments, but nothing was clarified. A direction was decided upon and now they have this, and it might not even be communicated that that pizza party came from the staff engagement survey.
Speaker 2:
I've also had people tell me about times when the survey was completed here are the results. And then the organization went a completely different direction with the changes they were making in the direction they went. There's nothing wrong with that. Maybe there was a very valid reason that they went that direction. They had other information from other sources. Of course, there's going to be things that all your employees are not privy to in the inner workings of the organization, but when nothing is communicated to the team after, they're going to be able to make a decision based on their own. Once again, they're just going to feel like the information they provided was useless. Why would they have bothered doing that? And then, of course, like I said for the next staff survey, they're not going to want to do it, even if they were willing to be a little bit more honest and safe in sharing that information.
Speaker 2:
So, as we break this down and this is something I have to do a lot because I do this work with organizations the surveys, the interviews, making sure that the impact is actually happening, that those ripples are the ripples they're hoping for there's a couple things you want to remember. One is there safety for your team to bring up this information, and maybe it's not on the whole organizational level. Maybe JP is actually able to work with his specific staff team, or even a couple of his staff, to start getting a sense, so he can start addressing pieces that people might not be feeling safe about, which then would lead for more space for that type of feedback and for more trust and safety. Even if you're a middle manager in your organizational culture is not amazing. You can take on that role of being a shielding, safe space for your employees to come to you and share that so you can start with that, making a safe space.
Speaker 2:
If you're a bigger organization, that safe space could be that external person who could support and make sure that the employees do feel okay about sharing some of their feedback. Then you want to make sure that the feedback you're getting, that you can clarify it in some way. If that has to be done anonymously, maybe that same person is going back talking to those people, seeing what this information actually meant to them and what they were hoping for from it, bringing it back so that we can clarify that and then that the direction is in alignment with something and that's communicated really clearly to your staff team so they understand that what they just did, what they put effort into because you asked for feedback had an impact, because they wanted it to have an impact. If they shared something, it was meaningful enough that they took those couple of minutes to write it out, to rank that number, and that is a gift that we should honor and thank them for by showing them and telling them what that is leading to. So, jp, you had a really great, complicated question and I really hope that this helped you understand some more facets of it and that it does help you in your future when you decide to do that next engagement survey.
Speaker 2:
You have a couple different choices about how to support your team, as always, because you shared with us. I would love to work with you for a session to make sure I did answer your questions fully and got all the information, because all of our stories are anonymized to make sure that we're not revealing anything on this show. If you have a story or a question that you would like to share, you can find the link for that in the description below and I hope to hear from you. If you would like to join the show live to ask your questions, make comments, please do. The link for that is also in the description below.
Speaker 2:
If you've enjoyed the podcast, if you could like and rate and review it. That is so, so helpful to me as we're getting momentum with this going. And again, I just want to thank you so much for joining today. If you are starting to rethink engagement from this, if you're starting to think about how you can support your staff better to truly give feedback, then that was a fantastic use of our time and thank you so much for listening and engaging. Have a great week.
Speaker 1:
We hope you enjoyed the episode. Make sure to subscribe, comment and connect with Leah at meetleahca.