How to take effective action on the back of engagement surveys

“We don’t want our employees to get survey fatigue.” I’ve heard some version of this statement from HR leaders countless times over the years. It may sound like a valid concern at face value, but it is based on a fundamental misconception.

The truth is that employees don’t experience survey fatigue; they experience lack of action fatigue.

Most employees have no problem spending a few minutes filling out a survey if they genuinely trust that it will lead to real change in their organisation. The problem is that in many organisations, employees don’t trust that their feedback will lead to change.

At Culture Amp, we work with thousands of organisations worldwide to help them transform their employee experience. We’ve found that while many organisations are consistently improving their employee experience, a significant amount of organisations are failing to get traction with their initiatives to boost engagement.

So what is different about the approaches of organisations that make a real difference and those that don’t? And how can your organisation start to drive real action off the back of engagement surveys so they don’t become a tick-box exercise that people actually start to resent? 

Well, here are some principles that might point you in the direction.

Change can’t just come from the top

We certainly need top-level buy-in to enact real change, but ultimately, creating a place where people can do their best work is the responsibility of everyone in the organisation. We need to charge people with making change at every level of the business.

There’s a famous quote from Tolstoy that states, “happy families are all alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. The same is true of families as is true of teams and departments in organisations.

After analysing score distributions across many organisations around the world, we’ve found that thriving teams have a lot in common (e.g. high levels of belonging, psychological safety, feedback, transparency, etc.). But the nature of employee experience issues faced by teams/departments can be very diverse. That is, the issues or challenges in one area of a business might be completely different to those faced by teams in another part of the business.

So how can you create a master plan of top-down initiatives that will address all the various nuanced issues across the whole organisation?

In short, you can’t.

Thus, organisations need to adopt a more decentralised approach to improving the employee experience by empowering leaders across the whole organisation to take meaningful action on survey results from their people.

You can only manage what you measure

In order to empower leaders to create change, we first need to understand what needs to be changed. This is why measurement is so important.

It is important to measure those aspects of the employee experience that are the best predictors of organisational performance — which is why using scientifically validated engagement surveys is so critical.

It is also important to understand that because the areas for improvement can differ substantially across the organisation, surveys need to have enough breadth to surface all of the diverse challenges that teams face. This presents a problem for pulse surveys, which have become more popular in recent years but are mostly only appropriate when action is being taken top-down across the whole organisation. Narrowing the scope of what you measure in your surveys can mean that you fail to identify critical issues at lower levels of the organisation.

Managers need to own their own data

If employee engagement survey data is sitting exclusively with HR leaders and senior executives, then the best actions in response to that data aren’t going to be obvious.

But if managers own their own data and receive reports on the experience of the people that sit underneath them, then they’ll be better equipped to understand the key opportunities within their own department or team.

Managers may not be able to change everything immediately in response to those reports, but odds are, there will be something they can do to drive change.

Focus is key

One of the main reasons that many people fail to make an impact with actions after an engagement survey isn’t that they try to do too little; it’s that they try to do too much. Often, overzealous leaders can try to address four or five things all at once, and as a result, they spread themselves too thin and fail to get traction with anything.

At Culture Amp, we’ve found the best strategy is for leaders across the whole organisation to choose one focus area to put the majority of their effort into. In this strategy, the executive team chooses one focus area and one associated action, and department heads and managers all do the same. This means each leader or manager is really focused on one key action to drive change.

And the data backs up this approach.

We’ve found that if a leader chooses one question from an engagement survey to act on and then implements an action in response, the average score increase for that same question in subsequent surveys is 8 percentage points. If you have a lot of leaders acting on a lot of questions over time, this can add up to significant change over time.

Not everything is important

One common mistake people make when choosing a focus area is that they select a focus that isn’t necessarily related to the outcomes that are most important for the organisation. This can look like focusing on aspects of employee experience that are the easiest to change or focusing on things that people feel negatively about but also don’t care that much about.

The solution is to focus on the questions in your engagement survey that are the strongest predictors of the outcomes that matter most in your organisation, for example, increasing turnover, reducing absenteeism, or improving customer service. This is where good survey analytics tools come in very handy.

Provide inspiration

Most managers aren’t experts in organisational culture, so ideally, you need to give managers inspiration and ideas on the kind of actions they might be able to take to improve their chosen focus area.

It’s also important that managers and teams take ownership of their actions, so they might hold a brainstorming session with their team to help turn that action into something that makes sense for their unique context.

Peer-to-peer learning is also a great option here. For example, pairing leaders from the most engaged parts of the business with the leaders from the least engaged parts of the business to explore what they can learn from each other.

What role do HR leaders play?

Reading this, you might wonder what role HR leaders play in driving action from engagement surveys if we’re asking managers to take the lion’s share of responsibility for actions and outcomes.

Ultimately, HR’s role is to really help leaders buy into the idea of this new approach by:

1. Understanding leaders’ pain points
2. Helping them see how taking action will address their pain points
3. Following up to make sure people are staying on task

When people get busy, these kinds of actions often fall to the bottom of the priority list, so HR plays an essential role in keeping people on track and accountable.

With this approach, you can create impactful outcomes from employee engagement surveys and build the foundations for real and lasting change within your organisation. Ultimately, it is consistent, focused, and democratised action that leads to a significant transformation of the employee experience over time.

By Dr Joel Davies, senior people scientist, Culture Amp