Over the last few years, as HR leaders have contended with challenges ranging from the Great Resignation to RTO rollouts, employee engagement surveys have become a lifeline.
Now, it may be hard to remember a time when HR teams weren’t begging workers to fill them out. So many businesses rely on engagement scores as a way to keep a finger on the pulse of their workforce. While they can be helpful for understanding some aspects of worker sentiment, employers may lean on them too much.
“Employee surveys are great. They are just over-relied on,” Maria Amato, a senior client partner who oversees employer value proposition and total rewards optimization at management consultancy Korn Ferry, told HR Brew. “I think the reason for that is because they are something that’s almost universally relevant.”
Andrea Derler, principal of research and value at HR analytics platform Visier, agreed. “There’s a lot of use cases for employee engagement surveys, and that’s exactly the problem. Basically, employee surveys are now used for almost everything.”
HR teams might try to use engagement surveys to gauge employees’ opinions on recently released software, or even their likelihood of quitting. But these surveys aren’t effective at answering these questions because they capture qualitative data, are a lagging indicator, and are often presented in aggregate, meaning teams can’t look for nuances in the data, Derler said.
And the results don’t always tell the entire story. What engages workers and what prompts them to stay in their jobs may be very different, Benjamin Granger, Qualtrics's chief workplace psychologist, said during a recent HR Brew event.
“The things that drive people to say: Yeah, my expectations here are met are exceeded, and whether I see myself here for long term are the stuff you’d find at the bottom of Maslow’s Hierarchy,” he said, explaining that good communication, clarity around job expectations and purpose, and pay and compensation impact retention. Meanwhile, engagement drivers are at the top of the hierarchy. “They are very correlated with each other, but they are different,” he added.
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And employees don’t trust the data: Just 32% of 1,000 US-based workers surveyed by Visier in October agreed that their company’s engagement surveys accurately reflect employee satisfaction. Some 37% didn’t believe the surveys were really anonymous, and 47% felt pressure to withhold feedback.
What’s HR to do?
Don’t ditch your employee engagement surveys. They do have a purpose, particularly in situations where there isn’t hard data.
“When they are done smartly, they can be very useful to understand more cultural components,” Derler said. For example, they can be used to understand what’s causing employee unhappiness or cultural successes and pain points during an M&A. “These are highly qualitative and very emotional topics that are perfect for a survey, because you cannot gauge that any other way.”
But to get an even better picture of how employees are feeling, HR teams should pair survey results with other metrics.
“What we’ve noticed in our work and our research with companies all across the globe is this growing awareness that it’s not just all about engagement. There’s these other really critical outcomes that senior HR leaders are starting to measure,” Granger said.
Metrics tracked will be specific to each company, but they may include those related to diversity, PTO, hiring, tenure, and performance, as well as individual industries. For example, financial institutions might measure employees’ financial well-being, while healthcare providers might track physical and mental well-being.
When deciding which metrics to track, HR leaders should consider their strategy, Amato said. For example, those focused on talent development might track internal promotions or internal vs. external hires. They might also track HR KPIs, like how many, and how quickly, job openings are posted internally, and the relationship between these metrics and turnover.
“You need to do a little deeper thinking about: What is your strategy as a business, how does that reflect in your talent strategy, and therefore, what kinds of metrics do you want to have?” Amato said.