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Our research shows that 78% of companies are failing to get good results from employee engagement surveys. Or put another way, only 22% are actually getting good results.
More than 4,000 HR executives have taken the online quiz “How Good Is Your Employee Engagement Survey?” One of the questions asks, “How have your employee engagement survey scores changed over the past two years?” and respondents are given four choices:
1. I don’t know because we haven’t surveyed regularly
2. Our survey scores haven’t changed significantly
3. Our survey scores have declined
4. Our survey scores were low but they’ve improved dramatically OR they were high and they've stayed high
Clearly, only Choice 4 is a good answer and, sadly, only 22% of HR executives selected it.
Now, why are employee engagement surveys failing so miserably? One reason is that most companies are actually attempting to tackle way too many issues.
Imagine that you’ve just conducted an employee engagement survey with 14 questions. And further imagine that your company got low scores on seven of them.
The typical company will think, “Okay, I guess we need to go fix those seven issues.” And thus the problems begin.
Think about the priorities of the typical manager. They’ve got to achieve profitability, quality, customer satisfaction, productivity and whatever other metrics the company throws at them. Then they have to resolve conflicts, hire new staff, conduct performance reviews, manage low performers, assign tasks and the list goes on.
Given all these priorities, where does employee engagement fall on the to-do list for most managers? Somewhere near the bottom, if it appears at all. And now we want those managers to fix seven different issues? It’s never going to happen.
Statistically, There’s Always One Issue That’s More Important Than The Others
Asking leaders to address too many issues is doomed to fail because if you attempt everything you’ll achieve nothing. But there’s also another bit of fallacious reasoning at work here.
Your company has a few stakeholders or customers that are just way more important than everyone else. (In fact, most companies would actually benefit from firing some of their least important and least profitable customers). And the same logic applies when it comes to employee engagement survey questions.
A few weeks ago, I ran a statistical analysis on the employee engagement survey data from a mid-size financial firm. And I discovered that 57% of their employees’ loyalty was driven by one issue: whether employees felt comfortable sharing work problems with their boss.
Last week, researchers at a hospital ran a similar analysis and discovered that 61% of their employees’ engagement could be explained by one issue: whether performance reviews were open and honest.
And a few days ago, I learned that 54% of a tech company’s employee engagement was driven by one issue: whether employees would have to learn new skills to achieve their annual goals.
The point of this is simple: You can quickly find 1-2 issues that are exponentially more important than all the other employee engagement issues.
If 55% of my employees’ loyalty is driven by whether they understand the company’s vision, why would I spend time on trying to fix any other issue? I could prioritize all of my efforts on tackling this one thing and experience far greater improvement than pursuing even a dozen other issues.
With Machine Learning (Or Advanced Statistics) You Can Ask Lots Of Questions
In the aforementioned examples, the way we discovered the big issue that drives employee engagement was through a combination of machine learning and multiple regression. And because these technologies are so pervasive these days, there’s really no reason for companies to pursue improving seven issues when improving one would suffice.
These technologies also mean that you don’t need to worry about asking too many questions on your survey. Yes, you certainly need to worry about trying to fix too many issues, but you can ask two or three dozen questions and be perfectly fine.
Why? Because as soon as you have all the data from your survey, you run it through a multiple regression and immediately discover the one or two issues that are exponentially more important than everything else. And that’s where you’ll focus all of your improvement efforts.
I see too many companies worry about the number of questions on their surveys and not nearly enough worry about the number of task forces they create after the survey. And that’s just completely backwards.
You can ask dozens of questions on your survey, as long as you only try to take action on a few of them. And ideally, the ones you’re acting on are the ones that will have the biggest impact on engaging your employees.
With 78% of companies failing to get good results on their employee engagement surveys, it makes to try something different. And prioritizing your employee engagement efforts just you would any other operational initiative is a great place to start.
