By Isa Watson
With the almost incessant buzz around the term “employee engagement” over the past few years, everyone knows how important it is for employees to feel a deep connection to the work they do. We all care -- and are all trying to do it well -- but the methods haven’t come close to keeping up with the buzz.
Why?
While many businesses rely on employee satisfaction surveys to signal how likely staff members are to stay, these so-called indicators of “engagement” are far from the end-all, be-all they’re chalked up to be. Instead, it’s important to cut through the buzz to break down why these surveys are only the starting point of fostering engagement -- it's what employers do beyond them that counts.
The existing limitations of surveys
It’s not that employee engagement surveys are useless -- you may have seen firsthand how well-designed surveys can help predict behavior, diagnose culture issues, provide a forum for feedback and even plant expectations for behavioral changes you'd like to see.
However, it’s also really easy to gather bad data with these surveys. People may lie for job security or because they don’t trust that their responses are truly anonymous. Some may be too disengaged from the culture to have any incentive to participate -- and those are some of the people you need to hear from most. Others simply may not believe that their voices will make an impact (the same reason many people don’t vote), either because they feel lost in a sea of people or because they don’t believe anyone will actually pay attention to the results.
Most surveys also don’t happen consistently enough to allow you to assess how people are doing on a continuous basis. Ask me how I feel on a Monday, and it could be completely different from how I feel the following Monday (or even later that week). You need more data points to establish a baseline rather than a snapshot of how people felt on a given day.
But let’s say you do design a clear survey and people respond and they answer honestly: Most surveys still don’t provide a clear sense of “what’s next.” For example, while Kansas State University research shows the benefits of having a friend at work, if your survey came back saying that many of your employees didn’t have friends in the office, would you know how to help them make a change? Probably not.