3 Common Myths about using Employee Surveys to Improve Employee Experience
Organisations have significantly increased their focus on employee experience since the start of the pandemic. Recent research from Insight222 and TI People investigating the business impact of employee experience revealed that 70% of survey respondents agree that business leaders have shown more interest in employee experience since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. The importance of frictionless and frustration-free employee experience (EX) is attracting more attention than ever before.
A critical component of improving EX is harnessing and utilising employee feedback. Employee experience is a complex, multi-faceted phenomenon, which covers the entire employee journey from before they join the company to after they leave. It also transcends boundaries into the employee’s personal life, as worklife balance is tested during long periods of remote working, impacting engagement, productivity and employee wellbeing. To make sense of the multifarious puzzle that is EX, gathering information from employees themselves is vital.
There are many ways to measure employee experience, including Net Promoter Scores (NPS), Customer Effort Scores (CES) and Customer Satisfaction Scores (CSAT). Most of these depend on employee surveys, collecting quantitative and qualitative data (which can be analysed using text analysis).
Most organisations deploy some sort of employee survey to gauge employee sentiment… how well they do this and how effectively they use the results is another question altogether.
In this article, we look at three common myths that companies get wrong about using employee surveys to improve employee experience, and how to address these. These insights are taken from a recent conversation with Melissa Arronte, Employee Experience Practice Lead at Medallia, who was a recent guest on the Digital HR Leaders podcast, discussing the business impact of Employee Experience.
High response rates are the ultimate marker of success
One of the main reasons employees don’t respond is they are time poor
We shouldn’t survey too often, in case of survey fatigue
High response rates are the ultimate marker of success
Organisations typically think that a high response rate on surveys is really important. Melissa describes a time when she “took a lot of pride in the fact that we had typically an 87% response rate on our engagement survey… and that if it was too low, it wasn’t healthy.” But response rates are not the be all and end all.
Organisations spend time and resources encouraging employees to fill out the survey, with a focus on improving this metrics. Many organisations still survey once a year and spend three to four weeks enticing employees to complete it.
The danger here is that the feedback provided is not genuine, accurate or honest. The employee is focused on “getting the task done” rather than engaging with the questions being asked. There is also a risk that the results of the survey are not used effectively, as the primary focus is on response rate, rather than the responses themselves.
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One of the main reasons employees don’t respond is they are time poor
When response rates are not as high as companies would like, or when there is low sentiment surrounding the employee survey, organisations often assume that a reason for this is limited time available to complete the survey.
Actually, a more important factor could be the employee’s context – a factor that is often overlooked. As Melissa says, “At the moment we drop the survey, any employee is experiencing a myriad of things, right? Maybe they have just had turnover on their team, or their manager just left, or a new process was just put in, or they are behind in a project. There are a million things that they could be focused on and now suddenly we are asking them about 60 different things and they have to stop and answer those things at that moment.”
The danger of overlooking the employee’s current context, is that they are reluctant to participate in a survey that does not feel relevant to their current experience. This could lead to broader sentiment of their situation being misunderstood or deprioritised.
The bigger risk, though, is that the organisation is not getting the feedback that they really need, because the right questions for the employee’s context are not being asked.
We shouldn’t survey too often, in case of survey fatigue
Organisations are reluctant to move to more frequent surveys or provide more frequent opportunities to provide feedback because of survey fatigue – the concern that employees will be overwhelmed by surveys and no longer participate or not provide genuine, honest feedback.
Employees are tired of being asked how they feel, but only because they are tired of no action being taken.
Taken from a recent case study provided by RJ Milnor, Head of People Analytics at Uber, for Insight222 Research, RJ said: “continuous listening is all about continuous response. Nothing discredits an employee listening program faster than inaction to the employee voice.”
How can organisations solve for these three myths?
Instead of fixating on response rates and survey frequency, organisations should focus on tapping into the individual’s context. How? By allowing employees to respond when they have feedback to provide.
When adopting this approach, Melissa explains why response rates are no longer a priority, “not everyone is going to respond at the same time. And so, we are going to have much lower response rates, but we have seen great response rates in what we call continuous understanding programs. Just allowing employees to provide feedback at any time. It can be 20, 25%, but if you have a good handful of employees raising an issue or suggesting an idea, it seems worth pursuing. We don't need 90% of the population to tell us.”
Melissa also explains how survey fatigue is less of a concern because the insights are used to make decisions, “those employees are not tired of responding because that data was used. It was used for senior leaders to make decisions and it was also used locally in the branches, where the teams could come together on their weekly huddle and use that as some of the input, the employee feedback, the customer feedback, the sales. All the pieces come together to make good decisions.”
You can tune into the full episode: How to Understand the Business Impact of Employee Experience on the Digital HR Leaders podcast.
RJ Milnor expands on his case study in Insight222’s recent research paper ‘Accelerating People Analytics: Developing a Data Driven Culture.’
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