Nobody has time for the usual employee surveys anymore. Anne M. Schüller presents activating, agile survey tools in a 5-part series.
We live and work in a high-speed environment. Nobody has time for the usual employee surveys anymore. Fast responses are essential in order to adapt to constantly changing circumstances. Agile surveys are therefore indispensable. They can be used in a variety of ways and optimize quickly.
Employee surveys provide a company with precise information about its internal state, for example about poor workplace conditions and operational constraints, time and motivation robbers, communication, interface and customer problems and thus about its own operational blindness, which can have a negative impact on business results. Above all, it must be possible to carry out such surveys quickly so that you can change something tomorrow if you ask today.
Traditional employee surveys are a tricky business
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In many places, the well-known regular employee surveys are still being carried out, those with long questionnaires and a predetermined tick box answer scheme. The aim is to gauge the mood of the workforce, uncover problems and obtain ideas for improvement. Such surveys are retrospective, i.e. oriented towards the past, and they usually take quite a long time to complete. However, in order to be fit for the future, it is essential to look far ahead and to act agilely, adaptively and quickly.
In the usual traditional surveys, only those points are usually examined that are of interest to management and serve the purpose of statistical comparisons with the previous year and departments. But employees certainly don’t want to be statisticians in statistics. What’s more, employees would usually find completely different points worth discussing or needing to be discussed. However, if you demote them to the role of cross-makers, you deny them exactly that.
Misinterpretations are almost inevitable
In addition, misinterpretations are virtually pre-programmed with checkbox questionnaires. Coming up with the right reasons when “Rather important” or “Less important” is ticked off is like poking around in the fog. Although you have an exact value, you have no idea why this is the case and what needs to be done better. But there is room for individual comments at the end of the questionnaire, isn’t there? Most employees don’t write anything in there “because it’s not worth the effort.” Specific improvement material is therefore rarely obtained in this way.
Respondents may also want to send signals with their answers. Facts and messages then get mixed up and turn the interpretation into a pure guessing game: Has satisfaction really fallen – or are employees just trying to get a particular manager to leave? Is the entire management team being punished for the latest change in strategy? Or is an entire department giving itself high marks because it wants to be seen as the best? Distorted results can also arise because disappointed, disgruntled and resigned people no longer take part in the survey “because it’s no use anyway”.
Pre-formulated standard questionnaires: useless
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Pre-formulated standard questionnaires, such as those that can be downloaded from the Internet, are completely useless if you want to carry out individual surveys. Conversely, if an institute is commissioned to do this, surveys are usually complicated, too many questions are asked and the (deliberately) complex analysis results can only be understood by an academic elite.
Worse still, the planning, implementation and evaluation of traditional surveys consume a lot of resources. And they take a lot of time. Six months from the decision to carry out the survey to the implementation of the first improvement measures is not uncommon. Six months! In our fast-moving business world, you can be broke by then. Nowadays, nobody waits patiently for long until a company finally gets into gear.
If incentives are given, they are manipulated
If the implementation is sloppy or the results are mishandled, this triggers mistrust and fear. Even seemingly small mistakes can become deeply engraved in the collective memory of the workforce and disqualify this instrument for a long time. It is not uncommon for the results to end up in drawers as a precautionary measure instead of in improvement programs. Or they are used internally as a means of exerting pressure.
As a rule, the respective findings are included in a manager’s performance evaluation and form the basis for variable salary components. But fear of bonuses is the mother of invention. It can therefore happen that bosses more or less dictate the desired answers to their employees. As a result, the departments that have cheated the most end up at the top. And people know this behind closed doors. I know of organizations where such machinations are the norm – and everyone hypocritically plays the wrong game.
We need modern survey methods
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All in all, traditional employee surveys are unproductive. The effort involved is disproportionate to the knowledge gained. There is also a lack of speed. Representativeness is also nonsense because you only get meaningless average values. Let’s concentrate on the outliers instead. It is precisely from them that you learn the most useful things: What works absolutely brilliantly and which problem areas urgently need to be addressed.
If the aim is to get a timely picture of the mood, thoroughly honest statements from a few employees are much more helpful than opportunistic or controlled responses from many. We therefore need other, better, faster, more activating, more agile methods to explore the highs and lows of internal company collaboration and set optimization initiatives in motion.
Series with agile employee survey tools
From now on, employees should be invited to contribute their moods, experiences, wishes and ideas in a different, better way. A company that receives feedback quickly is able to improve itself and its performance rapidly. And that, in turn, can give it a decisive competitive edge. In four further articles, I will be looking at the following methods, among others:
“The question of conscience” to employees
Rapid optimization via the speech bubble method
Highly intensive: the serial event method
Essential: asking focusing questions
Very important: employees only reveal their ideas if they believe that they will be valued. And if they are given “psychological security”: the protected space of an open and honest learning culture.
Anne M. Schüller is a management thinker, keynote speaker, award-winning bestselling author and business coach. The business graduate is considered a leading expert in touchpoint management and customer-focused corporate management. She gives keynote speeches on these topics at conferences, trade conventions and online events. In 2015, she was inducted into the German Speakers Association Hall of Fame for her life's work. She was named Top Voice 2017 and 2018 by the business network Linkedin. Xing named her Top Writer 2018 and Top Mind 2020. Her Touchpoint Institute trains certified Touchpoint Managers and certified Orbit Organizational Developers.
