Mastering Employee Engagement Surveys: Best Practices and Pitfalls to Avoid

At the Philly SHRM Symposium this year I met my new favorite HR Consultant, Edy Penn. We instantly hit it off and every time we have spoken we have had passionate conversations about HR practices. I want to share our most recent conversation around Employee Engagement Surveys. Done the right way, these could be a great tool in your leadership toolkit, but it’s easy to not administer correctly.

Read on for excerpts from our conversation including tactical advice on how to implement these surveys!

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Edy: So I think a big part of why I've spent so much time thinking about employee engagement surveys is because,  first of all, I mostly work with nonprofit organizations and just kind of as a matter of course, in a nonprofit organization, we want to understand how our employees are doing and what's the best way to do that. My experience is that nonprofits are very big fans of surveys. So the employee engagement survey was kind of an obvious way to go,  but also because of that, there are all of these 3rd party providers of employee engagement surveys and  as a practitioner in house in the organization would look at these and feel like I wasn't really getting everything I needed to get from that survey.

So a common or a popular question on there is, like, do you have everything you need to do your job and then the 5 point scale of strongly agree strongly disagree. Well, if 30 percent of the staff says “I slightly disagree” or whatever that number 2 is that I don't have all the things to do my job, as an HR practitioner and as somebody who's thinking about the future of the organization, what does that mean to me? And how is that actually actionable? How do I make that actionable? And so one of the first things I started to do is to do another survey! And so the next survey would be like, tell me the things that you need to do your job, or, tell me the ways you have all the tools you need to do your job, or tell me all the ways you don't have what you, because now I have nuanced community information, right? Now I can go to leadership and say, here's what we've been doing and here's, what's working and what's not working. And here's what we need to do because we haven't tried this before.

Kirsten: That's so interesting because these surveys mean nothing if you don't have a follow up of some sort. And so you're proving that point right there when it comes to generic questions.  You have to follow up to get more detail.
If you have people flagging certain things, you have to follow up to say we heard you.  You can't just have these things go into the ether because then employees get disgruntled. So in these generic surveys when they're filling out “I don't have everything I need to do to do my job” and then you don't send out a follow up survey and you don't have the information you need to take any action. 

Nothing happens, and then employees get disgruntled and they're like, why should I share? 

Edy: The next time you do that survey, it's going to be meaningless. Because they're like, “you told me you were gonna listen, I gave you my opinion and nothing happened.” 

I'm just going to play it safe because this is a perfunctory thing. Like we're not actually doing this to make a difference. And I am a big proponent of doing things inside of an organization that are going to make positive change, but absolutely will not do something that I think is going to be damaging to your staff. 

Kirsten: I actually had an experience during the pandemic where everybody went remote, and we were remote for, I think, a year and a half. The conversation around return to office started and so the president of the company at the time said, let's send out a survey.  And it's like, okay, do you want to know how many days people want to come back to the office? Because, you know, you could be getting yourself into some dangerous territory. 

They wanted to know. They want to hear it from the people. They wanted it to be a “collaborative policy”. So everybody gave their opinion, and the company said, No, no, no. That's too many days to be remote. We want you in office more days, and did not listen to the results of the survey. 

People were leaving left and right. Mass exodus. 

Edy: Of course. I think that one of the things that that story makes me think about is,  Far too often we do these things without thinking about the communications around the thing. So as a leadership team, if there is a frame, if there is a threshold, if there is something we are unwilling to do, we need to communicate that before we ask you what you want. 

Because if you want that very thing that we're unwilling to do, we've created damage. Like, of course,  that situation that we're trying to avoid. So be clear. Be transparent about the thing that you will not do and then ask the question because at least people are like, you know what they told us what we're what they really don't want inside of that framework, where, where's the freedom, what are my choices that are left. 

Kirsten: Right, and people want to be involved in decision making processes that affect their lives. So, you know, if you're saying,  I think I want people in the office three to four days a week, then give them the option to pick which one, right?  Don't, don't leave it open ended. 

Edy: Maybe that's an opportunity to say “give us some other ideas about how we could make it two or three days” so you're not only soliciting information about the thing that you want, leadership, organization, but you're also giving your staff an opportunity to feel some ownership in that decision by providing additional options.

If you want people who are going to stay in your organization give them ownership, or oftentimes I call it authorship  over your policies, practices, and procedures, right? Not only are they gonna feel like you heard me, they self reinforce, they self regulate, right?

You not only retain people, but now you're gaining talent by word of mouth.

Kirsten: One of the things I want to bring up so I don't forget is the timing of employee engagement surveys. My thought is always to separate them and let me know if you thought the same thing or even disagree, separate them from the performance review process. 

So I always think if your performance review cycle is annual, right? And you're doing it like end of year into the beginning of the year, you want your employee engagement survey in the summer. Maybe June to August, you want be as far away, because if somebody didn't get the raise they wanted, if somebody disagreed with their manager on something, they're going to put that right into your employee engagement survey, and you're going to have a completely biased result 

Edy: If you are an organization that's going to do evaluations annually, so only once a year, yes, please try to put your employee engagement survey at a very different point.

I've seen organizations do it right before thinking that that was going to be helpful. And what they don't realize is that all of your employees know that the evaluation is going to immediately follow the employee engagement survey that you just sent out. So all the anxiety that they're already feeling about that, they're already feeling  about that, and all that anxiety is going to show up.

And then, obviously, you don't want to do it after because there are going to be some very unhappy people with the way that the process went, or what their manager said to them, or those kinds of things. And, and it's going to also not bode well, you know, as neutral as you can kind of get your staff, that's where you want them to be when they take that.

Kirsten: Absolutely. Absolutely. I couldn't agree with you more. How about when it comes to employees who are very afraid that it isn’t actually anonymous. At a former company we had this and they would say “it says anonymous, but you can track the IP”. I'm like, no one wants to spend time doing that, first of all. 

But like, it's a real fear. And to me, that's a concern also. When you have people so afraid to take ownership of their answers, That's a problem. 

Edy: The best thing you can do as an organization is just be super transparent about who's going to see it, what that person is going to see, and who has access to what other  kinds of things that come out of that survey. Just be super transparent about that.  The thing that I found impacts how much your employees care about anonymity is how much action you take. 

Because if you take a lot of action on that survey, if you hear them and then do things to improve the terms and conditions of their employment, they don't care that it's not, that it's whether or not it's anonymous. Like I've had a situation where I've had to redact things in an employee engagement survey, because people were so honest that I was like, Oh, I, I can't reproduce this in any, in any form because everybody's going to know it was you and they're like, “I don't care. I want them to know it was me. Thank you for talking to me. I'm going to sign it. My name's at the bottom here.”  When it happened the first time, I was in such shock because I was like, wait, why would somebody be this honest about what is, what is happening in their, their department?

And that was the answer. We had just done a lot of work from the year following that they were like, Oh, you're going to listen to us. Here's some more stuff you can do. It's a great problem to have. At some point, they're like, I don't really care whether or not this is anonymous because I know it's handled the likelihood that like my manager is going to retaliate against me or leadership or HR, like the likelihood that's going to happen is low because I've already seen what you've done with the information we've already provided and now I trust you.

Kirsten: Before we wrap up, anything else about employee engagement surveys that you want to just share before?

Edy: A few things off the top of my head that I find  that are not helpful, right?

It's too long.  There's too many questions. It's obviously not anonymous. 

Kirsten: I find that sometimes too frequently also, like in organizations that do them too frequently, that can be an issue too.

Edy: You know what, I'm glad that you brought this up because the thing that we've been talking about, the employee engagement survey should be used as a benchmark. You can survey, you can do lots of other surveys if you want, and I encourage other surveys, but it is just, that is the, the ruler.

Here's where we're going to start. We're going to do this again next year to see how, see how we did.  If you give that benchmark survey, in my opinion, more than once,  what are we doing? 

Kirsten: Also, are you that insecure that you constantly need to know? Or that out of touch that you need to know? 

Edy: The most you need to give that, like, benchmark, milestone survey is once. I think that they're If you are a huge organization, perhaps twice, like if you have, you know, a good amount of turnover, right here, like there are things that I think would make having it more than once makes sense, but not as a default.

Kirsten: And also, that shouldn't be the place that people have to go to when they want to raise their hand and say, hey, I have an idea, or, I'm concerned about this, or, I would love it if we could do this.

You need to create more opportunities for that. 

Edy: I do not mind home built employee engagement surveys. I'm not adverse to that.  However, make sure if you're going to do it that way, again, make sure those questions are relevant to your nuanced community. Please don't go out and Google like employee engagement. If you're going to build it, then build it for real. Build it relevant to your community. 

Kirsten: Agree with you completely. And you know what? If you're gonna go out and Google a template, fine, as a place to start, modify it, add to it.  Period. Place to start.  And yeah, you, you don't have to create it out of thin air, but make it unique to your business. And what are you trying to solve for? What questions do you need to ask to get the answers that you're looking for, you know, maybe not the outcome you're looking for, but the information you're looking for so that you don't have to double survey like you did.

Edy: And if the only reason you're doing employee engagement surveys is to compare yourself to the organization down the street, don't do it.

Kirsten: I have a lot of clients that always ask about them (Employee Engagement Surveys) and, they ask about them a lot when the conversation of performance reviews comes up because they want to know about their own business performance and how their employees are seeing how they're operating as a leader. They want that feedback too. 

There's definitely a time and place for employee engagement surveys. I'm not against them by any means if they're done correctly, and as we just discussed, there’s all of those amazing tips and ways to do them correctly. 

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Interested in hearing more about Employee Engagement Surveys, or looking to build your own? Schedule a 90 minute Intensive with KDZ HR Consulting to talk through tactical solutions that will give you the results you need to run your business!

Special thanks to Edy Penn for such an amazing conversation. Edy can be found on LinkedIn!