I was reminded this morning in a conversation with a friend of an employee survey I had some contact with many years ago. The setting was a big Federal agency with a local budget over a billion dollars. They had conducted the survey in the previous month and the results had just come out. Like many surveys of employee satisfaction it said, “top leadership here is the problem.” I had just started doing some work with the top leader and his executive group, so I asked him how he felt about the survey results. “I absolutely agree with the employees,” he told me. “When I look at my executive group, I understand exactly what they are saying.”
So I went to the members of the executive team and I asked them how they were feeling about the survey results, and they said, “We absolutely agree with the employees. Just look at who we are working for.”
Of course, nothing meaningful was being done with the results and the issues were being swept under the rug. Incredibly, given that it had only been a month since the results came out, the top leader asked me, “Do you think we should survey again now to see if things have changed?”
So, as you may have guessed, I don’t generally believe much in surveys — and perhaps that seems ironic since I have just posted one that I do strongly believe in. The caveat is this: Surveys don’t create great workplaces. Surveys (if they are any good) create the opportunity to talk about how to create those workplaces. At their best, they create an opportunity for action. A survey, for example, about engagement that does not lead to engagement, but dies after the results are published may be a destructive rather than constructive act. Sharing the data isn’t the same as understanding it or actively using the information.
Too often, surveys are done in the hope of finding a scientific truth — of proving the facts (or perceptions) about this or that problem to people who don’t accept those facts (or perceptions) when they are shared via other means. In so doing, the survey inadvertently reinforces the existing culture, including the implied “them and us.”
I think we could look at surveys differently. A good survey ought to be introduced simply as a way to get a dialogue started about a topic that genuinely touches people and is on their minds. It ought to bear on their beliefs and not be about the instrument but about the forum. It ought to naturally lead people to convene and give them a chance to talk about their real experiences at work.
A great one might even inspire us to look at ourselves differently — and then to act.
Dan,
Well said — it should “not be about the instrument but about the forum.” Or to put in another way, it’s not the tool that creates the magic, but who is using it and how one uses it.
Business culture, with an over-emphasis on the intellectual/left-brain behavior, naturally will rely on tools and gadgets to “fix” people and problems.
Without a holistic approach that embraces the balancing feminine energy, dialogue and real change cannot occur. Simplistic of me to say, but I stand on those words.
Thank you, Deb. I’m right with you. A holistic approach is the thing! Best to you.