When talking to HR managers, internal communication professionals, and other people responsible for engagements surveys or any kind on employee survey, we find that many of them have a similar problem: employees respond with an increasing amount of cynicism, mostly along the lines of “It doesn’t matter what we say in these surveys. They don’t change anything anyway.”

There are various reasons for employees feeling (often rightly so) that these surveys are a waste of their time and their organisations’ resources. Sometimes they are done for no other reason indeed, than to have a number to benchmark against, and to boast about. There’s no need to comment on this.

However, quite often an engagement survey is run based on the best of intentions, but its design or the levers actually available to pull do not allow any action that’s eventually reaching the workforce. There is also a common misconception that HR changing policies and pieces of paper qualifies as “action”.

Engagement surveys have the potential to help you improving business performance and to be perceived as a valuable exercise by your people. To get there, 3 basic elements must be observed:

• Design the survey so that it clearly indicates the levers you have to pull, once you get the results. That’s far more important than having a single number for benchmarking purposes. We love to use surveys based on the Gallup Q12, but there are other ways to do it.
• Make sure that you are actually able to pull these levers. In most cases this means you need to be able to change the way line managers manage the people directly reporting to them. If this doesn’t happen, you are unlikely to get beyond a paper exercise.
• Act (there’s always some opportunity to improve. Being above industry benchmark doesn’t justify complacency) and make it very transparent to everybody what you are going to change, how this relates to survey results, what it is supposed to achieve, and what this means for the individual.

Sounds simple enough, but experience shows it’s not that easy. In most cases the initiative falls down because HR owns the survey and follow-up, but is not able to influence line managers to make any effective changes. If this is the case, you can save your money. Why would you invest in expensive diagnostics, if you know you won’t be able to treat the patient?