HR Peep Show

Survey Says, "Fewer (Engagement) Surveys"

• HR Peep Show • Season 1 • Episode 2

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Welcome to HR Peep Show! In this episode, hosts AnnE Diemer, Claire Baker, and Krista Lane delve into the world of employee engagement surveys. They discuss the historical context, purpose, and challenges of these surveys, and share their expert perspectives on how leaders can effectively utilize them. The hosts explore the common pitfalls of poorly executed surveys, the importance of a clear strategy, confidentiality, and actionable insights. They also provide vital tips for both employers and employees to ensure surveys are valuable and lead to meaningful change within organizations.

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Survey Says, “Fewer (Engagement) Surveys” - Show Notes and Transcript


Acknowledgments

This episode appreciates all the contributions made by participants in our live event series called Team TuneUp, but especially Lisa Van Lenner and our anonymous contributing HR leader.

Team TuneUp brings together People-minded folks who want to nerd out on the big and small of topics we don’t always get to think about in our day jobs: juicy, underappreciated, or sometimes existential questions that affect employees and employers alike.

The HR Peep Show podcast is produced by Krista Lane and hosted by Claire Baker, AnnE Diemer, and Krista Lane. This episode was edited by AnnE Diemer and Krista Lane. Music was composed for the Royalty Free Music Library by Rik Pfenninger. 

You can email us with feedback, questions, or topic ideas at team@hrpeepshow.com. If you’d like the chance to contribute to a future episode, we encourage you to join our next Team TuneUp event. You can find out more at hrpeepshow.com.

We also thank our friends who listened to early takes of episode 1 and gave feedback, and those we spoke to about making a podcast— especially Kamrin Klauschie, Kevin Landucci, and Jenna Lane for their invaluable expertise, advice, and encouragement.


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A Disclaimer

While we hope you’ll take away useful ideas that help your careers and/or workplaces by listening, what we share in this podcast should not be construed as advice specific to your situation. But, feel free to consult with us!


Additional Reading

Materials we recommend, if you want to keep nerding out on this topic:


Transcript

Part 1

[theme music underlying voiceover text]

KRISTA LANE: Welcome to HR Peep Show, where we pull back the curtain of life in Human Resources in the United States.

ANNe DIEMER: I'm AnnE Diemer.

CLAIRE BAKER: I'm Claire Baker.

KRISTA: I'm Krista Lane, and we are your hosts. We may be new to podcasting, but not when it comes to People work. We are each fractional consultants at the intersection of People and Operations with a collective several decades of experience, both in-house and consulting under our belts.

Today, we're talking about employee engagement surveys, their purpose and place in the workplace, how leaders can effectively use engagement surveys and what happens when surveys go wrong.

ANNe: I made this the topic honestly, because I love to rant about employee engagement surveys. Employee engagement surveys have been happening for, I don't know, almost a hundred years in the US and they really come from a good place.

Leaders want to give employees an opportunity to have a voice. There have been many tools and processes created that enable organizations to do surveys more easily, and subsequently they happen more often, but to me, somewhere in there, we lost the plot.

I don't know, maybe it got a little bit too easy. We knew what questions we were going to ask, and that meant the surveys could happen all the time. You could do it every two weeks if you wanted to. It just became really easy to run an employee engagement survey.

And I think my concern is when that happened, we lost some of the rigor around surveys. When you're given a set list of questions to use, you're not in a room or in a Zoom room with your colleagues debating which questions are going to be most useful, which questions are relevant to what's going on.

Right now, we're told employee engagement surveys are critical, so we aren't thinking about why we're running the surveys. We're running them because we're supposed to run them. And as surveys became kind of this check-the-box exercise for HR and for leaders, they also became that for employees, and that meant the quality of responses decreased.

A lot of times folks running surveys aren't really learning anything from it. They're doing it, again, just to check the box. And I think it's time that we kind of rediscover the lost plot because as I said, there's something good to employee engagement surveys, I think they can be really valuable and we wanna help people do that better.

So we're gonna start off just by talking about employee engagement surveys in general, and I'm curious to hear from you both. What's your first reaction when someone tells you they want to do an employee engagement survey?

CLAIRE: Barf.

KRISTA: Heavy eye roll… just immediately negative.

ANNe: Eye roll. Why? Where does that come from?

KRISTA: I think for me it's that like so few companies, to your point earlier, like even ask why; like they don't know why they're doing it. They just think it's a good idea, or they think that the survey alone will assuage morale concerns or other issues and tensions that have already been brewing for some time.

Because giving people a way to vent their frustrations is a cheap and easy solution, it isn't actually fixing any of the problems. They're just going to make them worse.

CLAIRE: My reaction, and I don't run a lot of surveys in, in my line of work, but, my reaction is that we're gonna put on a performance like we care, but we're not really going to think about how to measure what we're asking about.

And then like the people in a position to change. If they were going to change, we probably would've seen some sort of indication of that already. And, maybe I am jaded, but I have not seen many successful surveys.

ANNe: I agree with that.

KRISTA: yeah, and I don't wanna say that like can't be good. I think the premise is sound. But if you're not gonna do anything with the information, what is the point of asking? And to Claire's point, it just is like a performance of care that doesn't actually exist.

CLAIRE: Well, the part that drives me crazy is that like often the people who are asking for employee engagement surveys in another context are paying a lot of attention to user feedback, and they're not bringing that same frame of mind to the surveys.

ANNe: Totally agree. It's still a survey. I want us to be, I don't know, employing the scientific method when we're doing this, and part of that is going in with rigor, knowing why we're doing this survey. And I think the other part of it is recognizing a survey doesn't give us all of the answers.

So I feel like if someone came to me and said, “Hey, we should do an engagement survey,” one of my first questions would be, “where is this coming from? Like, why?” And I think the second would be, “is a survey the right way to answer whatever question you have?” But you have to know what the question is first.

KRISTA: A hundred percent.

ANNe: And if they say like, “the vibes feel off.” That's actually something I can work with. That's like, that's something like, okay, what vibes, which team, which department, what happened that caused this? And then we get into, is survey the right form? Because if it's just something that's happening with one person on one team, a survey might not be the right way to do it. 

But if you're trying to, you know, assess how well a return to office is going, that I think could be using a survey and that could even be using a survey every two weeks for like six weeks and then stopping. I don't think we should do every two weeks for forever, I think there is a purpose to that. But if someone's just saying we should do an employee engagement survey to see what the vibes are, for me, that's not enough of a reason to do a survey.

KRISTA: Yeah. It's like a lack of follow through that I think happens a lot. A lot of companies who wanna do a survey think that the survey is the solution like, that's the end point; that that will solve all of the problems.

They might have good reasons why a survey might be a good start, but I don't think that there's some reasonable expectation, what comes out of that. It's a tool. It's not a solution.

CLAIRE: I think there are some situations where people just run surveys because it's what you do. Like I do a lot of work with benefits and so every year they run a benefits survey, but I don't know if 70% of your people think that healthcare is too expensive and you don't have the budget for better plans, then like realistically, there isn't really much that you can do about that.

And so finding a way to ask questions. That brings up things that are actually within your scope of control and that you can actually act on is important because you've set an expectation by asking people for their feedback that you will take some action.

ANNe: Yeah, and I wanna get to talking about that more when we're talking about what is leadership's role in the survey. I said at the beginning that employee engagement surveys got a little too easy.

And, I don't know, part of me agrees with what I said, and part of me disagrees . So I'm curious: what do you think about how easy we've made surveys? Do you think it's a good thing? Do you think it's a bad thing? probably doesn't fit in a binary as nicely as we want it to.

CLAIRE: It becomes spam. It becomes one more damn thing that somebody's asking you to do. And maybe I'll spend five minutes on it if I find five minutes in my day and I wanna let somebody know how I feel, but like it's not a high priority, especially if I know there's gonna be another one in two weeks.

KRISTA: Yeah, there's that. One advantage I do think of in having easy surveys and having standardized questions that span across every customer of whatever the tool is that you use for it, access to benchmarking data. Like, how is, like, industry-wide sentiment on these same questions. How are other companies responding?

Which, I don't think that we've ever had access to that much collective data until fairly recently. That said, that doesn't make it a good idea because every organization is its own unique ecosystem. What works for one company, even if they might be peers on three other levels, you know, isn't necessarily gonna work in, in your company. So it can be helpful data, but it can't be the only data.

ANNe: yeah, I agree. I think the consistency of questions is actually really important because you can see changes over time. not every two weeks as you're doing it, but if you're asking the same questions in 2024 and then again in 2025 and then again in 2026, that gives you something that you're actually measuring over time and you're seeing what's changing.

KRISTA: I think you should also customize the language to how your company receives it. Like whatever the language is of your internal culture should be, you know, the wording that you use. Like you might be asking effectively the same question, but if you ask it in this like, really distant and different tone then what your company speaks in, then I don't think you're gonna get the same type of response from someone you're asking.

ANNe: I agree. I think it needs to be customized. It needs to not just be, I love a Culture Amp template, don't get me wrong, and it does have to speak to your actual org and your actual culture. Honestly, sometimes I wonder if I'm just in HR, because I like to know everything, like I wanna know all the tea. And so I understand leaders who look at their org and they're like, I just wanna know what everyone's thinking. 'cause if I know what everyone's thinking, we can make it better. But I feel like the thing that I've learned in HR is knowing everyone's opinion on everything doesn't always help me make things better.

It's better when I can go to folks with a, like, really strategic thing that I wanna dig more into because I'm really just not gonna please everyone just because I know all of the tea.


Part 2

ANNe: I also wanna think about surveys from a leadership perspective, because that's usually where it's coming from. Sometimes leaders suggest a survey and as we've been saying, it comes from a really good place. They want to check in with employees. gotta tell you, I highly recommend having a clearer strategy than just a check-in because you can do just a check-in as a human. You know, I don't know that we need a survey for that.

In Team Tuneup, we had a few folks who flagged their concerns about surveying without a clear strategy. Lisa Van Lenner, VP of Operations people and Culture at Mythical wants to do a survey, but she wants to keep it focused on what is within their sphere of control.

[10:36]

LISA VAN LENNER: But I'm like, oh, no, no, no. That can't be our goal. That… happiness can't be the goal. The ability to do your job and to do it well, and to feel fulfilled in the, in the work that you're doing. Maybe that's it, right? Like are you supported? Do you feel like there is, if not work-life balance? Do you know, like what the priorities are and when to stop working?

And then that's, that's a goal to like, you know, to encourage the manager and employee conversation. But it can't be to like, make sure that you're happy because there isn't one rule or anything that's gonna make everybody happy.

ANNe: We had another person in Team TuneUp, and I'm gonna leave this story anonymous, but this person described their concerns with over surveying. So we made a lot of jokes earlier in the podcast about surveying every two weeks. And this person had the same concern that when you start surveying every two weeks, people stop paying attention to the surveys. I don't think you're going to get kind of like the overarching vision if you are surveying every two weeks, especially if that survey is more than like three questions. People are just gonna start ignoring it or just go in and click, click, click, done, not do more than that, and I don't think it's gonna be helpful.

CLAIRE: They're called pulse surveys, right? Like, because it's supposed to be having your finger on the pulse. And I think that some people, like, especially people who wind up in leadership in business, there's probably a lot of overlap with the traits that get people really into like biohacking and they like want these surveys to be their Oura Ring or something.

But, like, your employees are not machines and they're not just gonna send you, like, activity logs every day because they are just constantly, like, leaving data logs behind them wherever they go. Like, you're asking them to share thoughts and emotions and subjective things. And that just isn't the right forum for that level of detail.

ANNe: I think that's such a good comparison.

KRISTA: And I think that's probably where a lot of leaders are coming from, is that they're so used to getting so much data from so many different sources. Like there are dashboards for products and metrics for, know, engineering metrics and all kinds, you know, lots of different departments have easily pullable metrics and data that the People team does not. I mean, it has some access to for sure, like recruiting definitely. But like, is not as common when it comes to like team sentiment or general morale or, you know, like team happiness, right? Like that's not gonna be something that you can pull off a dashboard, and like, getting a survey on a regular basis is not gonna answer that, either.

[13:23]

ANNe: I, I love the Oura Ring comparison because yeah, it is, people just like trying to get data, trying to know what's really going on, and I have such a hard time with that, because. I just don't think what people tell you is gonna necessarily be what's really going on. I think sometimes it's going to be, but not always.

My way of doing this, which it will be interesting to see if this makes the edit, is when I was in-house at an organization that had locations all over the world, I would go to another office. And I was working on diversity, equity, and inclusion, and I would come in and people expected me to have something to say, have something to do, “This is what we're gonna do when I'm in the office.” And I actually usually came in a few days early and just sat in the kitchen and just kind of watched and just kind of saw what was happening and just kind of, this is gonna sound so woo woo, but just kind of felt what was happening and who's talking to who, who's laughing, who's coming in for snacks? Who's leaving early and why? Who's talking? 

And for me, that's much better Oura Ring data than if I had just come in and been like, I'm gonna shoot out a survey on how DEI’'s going in this office. Especially because that's such a sensitive topic.

And obviously the information I got is full of my own biases, but it gives me a little something. And then as I started talking to more people in the office, getting coffee with folks, I would check my own biases. I would check these hypotheses I had from just watching the office. And I think that was more helpful than a survey. Now, am I actually recommending that to people? Woah. I have no idea. I have no idea if anyone else should be doing that. It's kind of creepy.

KRISTA: Well, and like you were relatively anonymous within the company to that population of people, whereas an executive or some other leader would not be. So who knows, like how your presence would influence how people act around you or in that environment.

ANNe: Yes. That's such a good point.

KRISTA: I mean, obviously you can't control for everything, but I do like the idea though of like, paying attention to people.

ANNe: I, and I think that's what I'm trying to say. Even if you're not, you know, doing the creepy spy thing that I'm talking about, I think just like, paying attention and being present with people. I don't think you're gonna get all the information. I think if you just get curious with folks, if you try to tap into that EQ, I think you're gonna get some of it. And I'm not saying this is gonna completely replace a survey, I just don't think we should be surveying where we could be having a conversation.

KRISTA: Yeah, I, I had one where, a company I worked at once that was a startup had an in-person brainstorm as a survey. So the executive team basically just wanted ideas from people. One section of it was about the product. So we did like a brainstorm on like pieces of the product that could be better from anyone at the company, which I thought was a cool way to like, involve more people in product decisions.

But then the other part of it too, was also about like how they work and what, what we could do internally and, and operatively to better support all of those teams efforts. Which, there are a lot of other problems with that method too, because…

ANNe: Yeah.

KRISTA: Namely, that, like, it is very not anonymous. and not that you can always protect anonymity anyway, it was also part of the culture at that company to be very forthcoming and to share opinions, and it was- for the most part- a pretty safe place to do that. With a few exceptions, but, but it's like, it's another idea. And I, and I appreciated like that it was an engaging conversation with leadership that invited a lot of follow up conversations and know, to your point AnnE, that like you can have deeper conversations offline about whatever it was that came up in that brainstorm session. And it took like a total of an hour, with 30 people in the room.

ANNe: Short. Yeah.

KRISTA: And one person was in charge of making sure that everybody had said something, even if it was really pithy. Yeah, it was interesting. I dunno that I would do it for a bigger company than that, but…

CLAIRE: But I also think that observational data can tell you what you should be digging into. Because like maybe you'll notice that all the conversations stop when somebody walks into the room, and you might have a theory about what that's about, but it may not actually be what you think it's about. Or you may notice that like. I don't know, a certain group brings their lunch every day and you can ask what all, what that's about. And it could be about like things that you're ordering for lunch, like don't work for a certain subset of your population or something. and it's really hard to know to ask those questions if you're not just sitting in the corner like a creep and paying attention.

ANNe:  Yeah.

KRISTA: Well, and I also understand that in remote companies, that kind of observation becomes harder.

ANNe: It's definitely harder. You can't do it perfectly, but I feel like when I joined orgs in-house, or even when I come in as a consultant, part of my role is to read the room and read the team really fast. And who has their camera on, who doesn't have their camera on, who's in the chat? Who's not in the chat, who's leaning forward, who's kind of, you know, who's got their hands behind their head just leaning back, like not paying attention. I feel like you can see pieces of it. Like I can tell who's texting someone else in a Zoom meeting, like who's chatting about what's going on in the Zoom meeting with each other based on like, how they glance at each other or when they look down or when they giggle a little bit. 

But you do have to, you gotta really pay attention and you have to, to Claire's point, which I think is so important, is like not assume you know what that means. Like I'm not gonna assume because I can see two people texting each other that they're making fun of me.

I mean, to be clear, my anxiety is absolutely going to assume that. But hopefully the work I've done in therapy is gonna remind me to check my cognitive biases there.

CLAIRE: Krista and I have not been texting about you this whole meeting. AnnE.

KRISTA: I'll just put my phone away over here. 

ANNe: Let's go back to that first thing we were talking about. The first question I asked you, someone tells you they want to do an engagement survey and Claire's first thought is barf. But we try to engage, we approach with curiosity. What are we advising leaders to do to make their surveys effective? Like I do think there is a place for surveys. We've all talked about that, but it's gotta be done well, it's gotta be effective. What are some of our pro tips for doing an employee engagement survey well?

CLAIRE: I would say when it's done really well, you have a hypothesis and you are. Asking a question that is tailored to find the answer to that hypothesis and any of the answers you get, even if they're the ones that you don't like, you're prepared to take action on them.

ANNe: Start with a hypothesis. We're going back to that scientific method piece. Krista, what do you think?

KRISTA: I would say it's really about, you know, whether or not it is a formal scientific hypothesis. It is rooted in what are we trying to learn from this process and what are we willing to do in response to it?

How will we follow up? whether that's like, what do we have the budget to change if there's something that costs money or what do we have the bandwidth to change if it's something that costs time or, what kind of other adjustments might might, we be willing to make, if we get this range of responses that we might be expecting. 

Um, so it's really thinking it through from both. Like “why are we doing this in the first place?” All the way through “What happens when we get answers that we don't like?” Or that we do like, that we want to do something about.

ANNe: Yeah, I completely agree. I think the knowing what you're willing to change before you go in is like one of the most important things. And it's not, you don't get to just ask about the things that you're curious about. Like are you curious about if people are happy? Honestly, same. I'm also curious if people are happy, but since I can't do anything about it, it's not gonna be part of my survey to Lisa's example earlier.

I'm also curious about, are people happy with their compensation or do people think they're being compensated fairly? But if I can't change anything about their compensation, I'm gonna be very intentional with how I ask anything about compensation. Because just by asking something, you're implying that there there could be some kind of change and you don't wanna do that.

Like everything you ask about, you wanna be able to follow through on, even if the answer's not something that you're expecting or not, something that you like.

CLAIRE: I once did a survey. It was benefits feedback. It was that annual one and we got, we got really good responses, like a really high response rate, and all of the answers to all of the questions were basically just like, yeah, it's fine. Like works, except for 50% of the people who bothered to respond said that they wanted a 401k match and we, we presented the results and we were like, there is one clear thing that we can do to show that we are responding to these people. and the decisionmaker was just like, yeah, no, we're not gonna do that. And I'm like, why did you even have me put it on the survey then? But that's the sort of thing that you have to be prepared for.

But I think I have seen other leaders who just delete the question and, and I think that that is not the correct way to handle it.

ANNe: I'm also thrilled that they still presented it at the end, because I'd say that's one of my other tips for leaders is if you are going to ask your team to put in the time to fill out a survey, you have to present on all of the results.

You cannot just delete results you don't like. You cannot just sneak by something like people are gonna notice. So if you've asked a question, follow through on it. Even if you're gonna be sharing something that people don't like, that's what you signed yourself up for.

KRISTA: And it's not just about following through in a way that you know can be, it can be a learning opportunity, it can be an employer branding opportunity. However you operate and however you present that data, is how you as a company operate in general. It is an expression of your values and it's a great way to calibrate what employees can expect from their leaders.

ANNe: Absolutely. I like the idea of thinking of the like relationship between leadership and employees when it comes to surveys, because that's what they're trying to do is leaders are trying to understand the employees, but that requires more than just asking questions, like that requires a lot more back and forth and requires kind of putting yourself in their perspective, which is actually what we want to do with this last segment of the podcast.


Part 3
[00:24:02]

ANNe: Now we're gonna pivot and think about employee’s perspective when filling out employee engagement surveys. And really we're still talking to leaders too, because that's what a lot of employee engagement surveys come down to is, as Krista said, the relationship between leaders and employees.

But understanding it from an employee perspective I think can really change how you frame and how you use employee engagement surveys and how you can really make them effective. So Krista, I know you have a story that you've heard from a friend who had a not-great experience with something that happened with their employee engagement survey.

Tell us a little about that.

KRISTA: Yeah, so I, I had a, a person who I'm friends with, I've also provided a little bit of mentorship over the years with them. but this person worked, uh, at like a small startup, probably between 30 and 50 employees. they're one of those startups that like doesn't have an HR team.

Setting the stage, the situation. At some point they did a survey, which I was like, who ran this survey? But okay, great. So glad that somebody thought to ask something. She had been there for a couple years at that point. And so she had like a lot to say 'cause she'd been with the team for a while.

She'd seen it through a lot of change. Like startups that size, like don't typically see people stay that long. So I feel like she probably would've had a lot of good perspective to share with them. And she's also a pretty honest person. She's like very forthright. she'll just say what she say, what she thinks, and she's not mean about it, she's just honest. and she shared some things about the company, that were just answering the questions honestly in this. and then she got like a firm talking to, from someone who was asking why she answered some of these questions so negatively.

If she's so pissed off, why is she still working there? like all these things that she was like, okay, well let's have a conversation. But like, I was just being honest and I have been honest with these, like I've, nothing I have said here is something I haven't said to my manager or like to other peers or things like that.

And they kind of left it there 'cause they were like, “oh, okay, I guess you're not like actively angry about this.” And then later she was not promoted. She was, that was like a few months before the promotion cycle. had been due for a promotion and a raise and she got neither.

And she asked about it and the response from her manager was, “oh, well leadership really didn't like how you responded to the survey. They, they don't wanna promote someone with that kind of attitude about working here.”

ANNe: I hate that.

KRISTA: I just couldn't believe it, I was like really? You would be that explicit?

CLAIRE: Everyone in this story is doing it wrong,

ANNe: Well, I think, uh, we all have a sense for what went wrong here, but let's make it really clear. What happened in this scenario that maybe shouldn't have? Claire, you wanna kick us off?

CLAIRE: So I am going to take the non-obvious, opposite side and let you destroy it if you would like to. But also in addition to the thing that everybody else is reacting to, that I feel the same way about, it sounds like this person may have been sharing feedback but not actually sharing constructive suggestions to address it. And you have to keep in mind what this survey is for and you can have all kinds of feelings that may or may not be appropriate for the survey, but understanding that the people who are asking you for your feedback are looking for actionable things that they can work on. 

And so it's not an appropriate place to be like taking moral inventory of everybody at the office who is imperfect. You can do that. There are places for that, those conversations, but in the survey you should keep in mind your audience and what's realistic and maybe save other conversations for a more appropriate venue.

I do not condone the thing that everybody else is reacting to though, just very, to be very clear.

ANNe: No, absolutely. Like think about what you can change. In the same way we're telling leaders, “if you're running a survey, think about what you're willing to change based on the responses in the survey”; when we're employees filling it out: Think about what can change based on your responses in the survey and figure out how you want to address that and figure out if a survey is the right method.

Like it does sound like this person was also giving feedback to her manager in one-on-ones. So like I'm thrilled to hear that because that would be my suggestion is like, don't just rely on the survey, also talk to your manager. And I love that this person was doing that.

KRISTA: Yeah, I, I mean, and I, I do take Claire's point and I think it is quite valid. This person probably, I saw a few of her responses. But, do think there were two things that did not so go so great on this vein that Claire's talking about, one of them is, I don't think that the company set very good expectations, like they didn't frame the survey, right? They just kind of sent a link to a survey, um, without a lot of context or understanding about how it would be used or what they would be looking for. So that was on the employer side. 

On the employee side, one of the examples that she gave was talking about Return to Office, which had been really unpopular for the company as a whole. And I'm sure that they did not receive largely good sentiment about that. then I think the company got really defensive about it because they got negative feedback in the survey.

ANNe: Hmm.

KRISTA: I think that that could have gone better in a lot of different ways. One of them could have been that they could have been really transparent about why they wanted to return to office and what they saw the value of it as.

Even if they didn't see the value of it, they could have said, “we’re facing a lot of pressure from our investors to utilize like the the space that we already have rented, our lease isn't up for a few more years.” Whatever. Like there could have been ways to frame that in a way that might not have made the company like so defensive about it. 

But yes, I do take Claire's point. I think that's very valid. I think she could have phrased it better, but also I think the employers could have framed it better.

ANNe: absolutely. And I think they're gonna lose so much trust. I hear that the feedback could have been given differently. Yes. And, now you have it. So decide what you're gonna do with it and decide if you're going to use this as an opportunity to build trust or lose trust. 

And if I had to imagine, this person is not gonna be giving useful feedback in a future survey. I don't know that this person is gonna be filling out a future survey after what happened here. And I think that's worth considering. 

So like, maybe just in this conversation, we're encouraging employees to really be thoughtful about what you put in your employee engagement surveys to find ways that you can affect change well. And, I am worried for that company of if they ever do a survey again, are they gonna get any responses, like a survey going to be useful for them anymore? I still think it can be, but I think a lot of trust has to be built back in order to do that. And they’re gonna have to be pretty rigorous about that.

CLAIRE: I just to be clear, I don't disagree with that. I think the company totally messed it up and I think that that is the more important point. But also since we're talking about employees, um, many of us come with the frame of mind of a one-star Yelp review and like, that's not the vibe of employee engagement surveys. Like it, you should be thinking of it as a presentation to leadership about how the company should change. and if your presentation is “y'all suck,” then they're not going to listen to your feedback.

ANNe: yeah. You gotta think about what can they actually do with this?

CLAIRE: And it sounds like they really messed up in presenting the survey as well and setting expectations for the types of answers that would've been useful in addition to how they followed up, which was not ideal.

But I totally recognize the impulse, especially if you haven't felt heard in those manager meetings. Now you have the CEO's attention and that's a lot of pressure with probably a lot of pent up emotions. And so the impulse is to like angry type and let 'em know what you think. 'cause finally you have the floor. And what, what's a shame is it sounds like this was a missed opportunity on both sides.

ANNe: I was thinking about with return to office RTO questions specifically, I don't think you should ask people, do you want to return back to the office or do you like being in the office three days a week?

I don't think that's gonna be an effective question. I think you could ask if you're asking an open-ended question. What are some of the challenges that have come up for you in returning to the office? I think then you can get some interesting information and maybe you can find some way to address some of those specific challenges.

Also, maybe you can't, but you can help people feel heard by, you know, sharing out in the follow up. I think you can ask people what are some of the benefits of being back in the office to kind of help people lean into that a little bit and think about what they've come from. Like, I do think there are ways you can ask questions around RTO other than asking, “do you want this?”

Because I think we sort of know the answer to that. I don't think that’s going to be helpful in your employee engagement survey.

KRISTA: Yeah. I think you're already kind of doing this, AnnE, but it sounds like you think one of the more important ways to build trust around surveys is having a really clear process. What are, what are some of the operational best practices you recommend for surveys?

ANNe: I love this question. I've seen, and honestly, I've administered some bad surveys and I want to see folks do the operations better because I think really strong operations behind your employee engagement surveys builds trust. So a couple things that I think about: first is confidentiality.

Before you're giving a survey, you want to explain to folks who are going to see the raw result, who's gonna be able to read across the row. Maybe you're having people submit their names, maybe you're not. Even if you're not having people submit their names. The person who can read across the row can probably tell who each person is.

So they need to know who is going to have access to the full set of results, and that's going to change. The tone that they use to communicate them, how they shape what they say, and also it just like, builds trust because now they know who's on the other side of the keyboard that you're typing to. I also think that folks administering the survey specifically should think about de-identifying responses.

So if you are asking questions, even if you're not giving names, if you say, when you're reporting back on the survey, managers at this level in this location said they like this particular management theory. You are identifying people because if there's only two managers at that location, at that level, people can figure out who they are.

So really think about de-identifying responses by sharing in aggregate and thinking about who is encompassed in that aggregate. If it is fewer than five people, individuals are gonna be able to be identified. That's really gonna change how employees share in the survey, and you want them to share a lot, but you also want them to be intentional about what you shared to Claire's point earlier, and they'll be able to do that when they know who their audience is, when they know how it'll be shared.

I also think you should explicitly say that responses will never be cited as a reason to alter your performance rating. 

The exception is if illegal behavior is reported, that's not related to employee engagement survey. That's related to creating great workplaces altogether. And I'm not just saying that because we're talking about Krista's friend’s situation- that is in my, I have a document for best practices for surveys, and that one was already in there because this is something that people worry about.

Even if you think as a leader, “oh, no one's worrying about that. I don't need to say that”-- you actually do. People are worried about what they say in employee engagement surveys impacting their performance, impacting their compensation, impacting if they get to stay at the org. 

KRISTA: It is It's like that legal thing where they're like, anything you say can and will be used against you. Which is, you know, what happened in the bad example. 

But hopefully that is not something that would happen in the future. But that's like the expectation that I think most people go into saying like, oh, well if I put myself out there and I say these things that, know, they could be used against me, if that's something that is either disagreeing with like the whole company or is disagreeing with what leadership wants out of the survey.

ANNe: And otherwise, I think we've talked through a lot of kind of the best practices I recommend, which is identifying your goals in advance, knowing the purpose of the survey, knowing why you're asking these questions, choosing actionable topics.

If you're putting a topic in a survey, that means you are willing to make a change on that topic. If you're not willing to make a change on that topic, should it be on the survey? Because if you just wanna know what people think, you can ask them. It doesn't have to go in their employee engagement survey. 

And then lastly, you have to follow through. If you send out a survey, you have to tell people what the results were, you need to tell them within a reasonable amount of time. That depends on the size of your org, but I would say within a month would definitely be my recommendation, if not sooner.

KRISTA: And then I think, Claire had some good ideas about what employees should be thinking about, kind of on the opposite end of that spectrum.

CLAIRE: Yeah, I, I just love seeing the survey results when. It's a really specific situation. You were in this conversation and you know exactly who this is and they're just venting about something that didn't play out their way. And I often work in pretty small orgs too, so like there, the leadership team might be the same three people again and again.

And I, I just think like you already got your response to that. Do you really think that somebody different is going to be like reading this survey in this 22 person org? Like who do you think you're talking to? It's the same people that were in your HR meeting two weeks ago.

KRISTA: That is not true if you hire a third party like one of us to assist you in that process and deliver an an objective report.

ANNe: Truth. I think that can be helpful when you bring in external folks, because One, we don't know the context, but two, we can see how it fits into a bigger picture in a way that's sometimes harder to see in-house.

CLAIRE: Well, I mean, I think a neutral outside party can always see things that people who are inside the situation don't see. They may miss things, but they may also pick up on other things.

ANNe: Yeah. I feel like what I'm hearing from you, Claire, is when employees are filling out these surveys, it's not an opportunity to do your, uh, gripes or anything. I guess maybe small scale is what I'm thinking about. I think instead, what is effective is thinking about things that are systemic, things that are org-wide, things that are affecting a larger group of people, because that's what surveys are ultimately supposed to be doing. It's supposed to be giving you an idea of the kind of big picture, the overview.

KRISTA: Well, or, or what would be meaningfully helpful? What I'm saying is like, it can be about the bigger picture and the systemic stuff, but it can also be what would make a meaningful change or impact to your day to day and your experience.

ANNe: But, like, the likelihood of you getting someone fired, like a very specific person fired based off of your employee engagement results. No, it's probably, it's almost certainly, I guess I can't tell you a hundred percent it's not gonna happen. 

Again, if you report illegal behavior, it is HR’s responsibility to follow up on it. And, if you think someone needs to be fired, I think you should just go have a conversation with someone about that. I don't think an employee survey is the way to affect that type of change.

CLAIRE: This is not the place to be complaining that Karen keeps taking your parking spot,

ANNe: Yes, yes. Like do complain about Karen taking your parking spot, but not in your employee engagement survey. That's not going to be an effective way to deal with that situation.

To summarize what we've talked about today, we really think that surveys are one of many tools in our belts that can address what's going on at work, but they're not low effort and they're not gonna answer every question that you have. They can be helpful when you've built trust with your team and when you're committed to follow through. And, when you have a clear ask, you have a clear purpose for your survey. But also we want you to remember that surveys alone are not enough. You need to be having real human conversations in your workplace.

Surveys absolutely have a purpose, but they can't do everything for you and they especially can't do everything for you if you don't put a lot of intention into getting them right.

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KRISTA: That's it for today's episode of HR Peep Show. With your hosts, Claire Baker, AnnE Diemer, and me, Krista Lane. Thank you for listening, and thank you to our team Tuneup guest, Lisa Van Lenner. Stay tuned for future episodes covering both hot takes and practical advice to build sustainable people driven companies. To view transcripts and full credits or find out more about us, go to hrpeepshow.com. ​

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