10 ways to screw up an employee survey slideshare

10 Ways to Screw Up an Employee Survey

Organizational Performance Through Organizational Health

Surveying employees in order to understand concerns and

assess levels of engagement, satisfaction, and commitment

is a best practice for organizations of all sizes.


If done well, employees are happy to share

honest sentiments with company

leaders.


The information received can reveal

significant dysfunction and

discontent simmering just

below the surface.


Left unchecked, these issues will fester,

becoming a cancer that destroys the health of

any organization.


However, we all know that strong leaders tend

to enjoy a challenge.


After all, anyone can lead a healthy organization… it

takes a very special leader to squeeze results from a

sickly, dysfunctional one…


So… I thought it might be fun to share how to

implement an employee survey without the risk of improving current cultural

toxicity levels…


If done right, you could even make

them worse!


So here they are…

10 Ways to Screw up an Employee Survey


Buy the biggest brand name survey out there. Why not go ahead and convince the finance guys to approve a huge investment in a nationally recognized survey company? Everyone knows that the biggest and oldest must be the best. Besides, it’s super important to compare your results against millions of data points from the 1980s.

1


Just write up your own survey questions. After all, how hard can it be to create questions that will accurately capture sentiment without creating bias in the results? Employees like the challenge of answering poorly developed questions that leave them wanting to select “unsure” as their answer.

2


Just keep using the same old survey.

Even if it’s stale, untrusted, and ignored by employees, implementing a new process is just too much work. Although charting a new course requires an up-to-date map, the old survey is familiar and probably good enough to maintain the current course.

3


Ask a bunch of irrelevant questions. Employees love to answer questions that you have no intention of addressing with action. When they know you don’t plan to do anything with the results, they will usually waste less valuable company time completing the survey.

4


Don’t emphasize confidentiality. It’s really not important to let employees know you plan to protect individual responses. If you do, you may get truthful and sometimes negative feedback. When employees mistrust the survey process, they’ll be sure to put a positive spin on their answers just in case. This makes for better survey numbers!

5


Have the HR manager administer the survey. Employees enjoy sharing potentially career-ending feedback with individuals within the organization. Don’t be fooled, most employees like the adrenaline rush of living dangerously close to edge of the career-suicide cliff.

6


By all means, don’t share the data. After collecting the survey data, just talk about it at the executive level, but don’t share it with employees. Knowledge is power, and we don’t want valuable survey insights to fall into the wrong hands.

7


Don’t take any action on what you learn. Employees hate change, so even a bad status quo is okay with them. This practice will also show that the survey process is really just a waste of time and should be skipped if possible, again saving valuable productive hours.

8


Make the action planning process an administrative nightmare. When the results come back, be sure to create a burdensome process that managers and employees will dread. Require that each manager create detailed action plans for each survey element measured. Afterwards, require detailed weekly reporting and dashboards showing progress toward their goals.

9


Just do the survey once. Take the baseline measurement and never check your progress. Why obsess about improvement? Just throw some tactics in place and see what happens. They’ll probably do the trick. After all, after a life-threatening diagnosis by a doctor, patients usually just try a few therapies and hope they work.

10


Any questions?An employee survey process that works.

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http://wolfprairie.com/


http://wolfprairie.com

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10 ways to screw up an employee survey slideshare