Why some employee surveys fail

Despite the best efforts and intentions, sometimes the employee survey process fails to produce meaningful organizational change. Here are the four common reasons this can occur.

1. Lack of management buy-in

Human Resource executives often initiate employee surveys with the goal of identifying ways to improve the work environment for employees. If senior management is not fully committed to the process of discovering and implementing meaningful changes, employee surveys can become little more than intellectual exercises. As a result, when the organization conducts surveys without providing feedback to respondents and/or acting on the results, employees become dissatisfied and disengaged from the process.

To avoid this common pitfall, see Best practices for employee surveys - Step 3: Get buy-in from managers.

2. False sense of security

Sometimes management seeks to learn how the organization is doing compared to other companies. For this reason, some employee survey providers offer comparative data. However, these comparisons can be misleading or misused.

For example, if the organization is rated consistent with other companies, management may erroneously conclude that there is no need to make changes. Or if an important rating is low on an absolute basis but consistent with or higher than other companies, management may decide that the results are “good enough” despite what employees consider to be a significant problem.

For these and other reasons, we discourage the use of comparative data. After all, you know how your company needs to be rated if employees are to be considered satisfied. Focusing on other companies instead of your own can lead to serious flaws in analysis.

3. Executive denial

When results are below average, management frequently discounts the significance by blaming the timing of the survey (during a business downturn, time of high employee turnover, etc.) or the way some questions were worded. Thus, they may conclude that the results are actually not problematic and do not warrant any corrective action.

This scenario tends to evolve when the company has failed to establish meaningful objectives for the employee survey and/or failed to achieve management buy-in to the process and/or questionnaire. This outcome can be demoralizing to employees who provide their candid feedback and then find that nothing changes.

4. Poor intentions

In some companies, management either conducts employee surveys to identify scapegoats or reacts to poor ratings by punishing the managers responsible for those areas. When this happens, the morale of both employees and managers will suffer.

Bottom line

The best foundation for conducting employee surveys is a management team that is fully engaged in and committed to the process of solving the problems that employees identify in their work environment.

See also: Best practices for employee surveys