Why the Employee Survey Should Become a COVID-19 Casualty
There’s a lot of talk in the world at the moment about “getting back to normal.”
In the personal world, much of that talk has to do with dinners out, proper haircuts, and the ability to return those cute but ever-challenging youngins back to the schools where they belong.
In the corporate world, the back-to-normal agenda becomes far more debatable.
As business gears up again, it will be doing so under profoundly different conditions than it faced just before the COVID epidemic.
Spare cash will still be hard to come by. Employment numbers will be substantially down, added to by the “great resignation”, and new issues like the emergence of remote-first and hybrid models will come into play. Customers will be deeply price-sensitive while increasingly value-conscious.
Change will also be substantial and severe. Changes in demand, supply and markets are already upending strategies, and misalignment increases as the adjustment to remote work continues on.
The next stage of our journey doesn’t involve doing a little more of this and doing a little less of that. It’s about doing the right things, doing them differently - stopping doing the wrong things.
It’s Time To Bury The Traditional Employee Survey
For about the last twenty years, organizations felt compelled to measure themselves - and often to measure themselves against each other - against a quantified yet still vague measure called “the employee engagement score.”
Administered for costs that for large organizations run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, employee surveys mainly seem to have three main purposes: to measure the trend of the employee engagement score from year to year in various organizational teams and silos, to shift responsibility for addressing those issues, mainly onto team managers, and for tracking their benchmarked performance relative to direct competitors and admired high-profile brands,
But while a good benchmarking performance against a popular computer-maker or coffee-shop chain could make execs happy for a little while, and sagging team engagement scores could provide useful evidence for ousting that team’s manager, a key problem of employee surveys is that they provide little in the way of immediately actionable data. The findings can be a little too generic to be relevant at the implementation level, and the insights a little too squashed into the bias of what the organization wants to know, rather than could emerge.
What’s Actionable Employee Research
Instead of using long surveys which then get distilled into a few numbers, actionable employee research focuses on:
- Specific attitudes held by employees and the extent they drive or impede performance and collaboration
- Connections between individuals and the patterns of influence and leverage in organizations
- Common levels of knowledge about shared objectives, values and practices
- Adding one or all of these research streams allows organizations to pursue alternative, more value-additive goals than a single “engagement” score.
- Team Alignment Research: an approach that identifies and addresses gaps between individual, team and organizational attitudes and friction and waste that comes from misalignment.
- Organizational Network Analysis, the research approach that identifies and maps individual connections, helps organizations tap into the “three percent rule” - finding the three percent of employees who drive 90% of organizational conversations.
- Message Recall Research: an approach that tests penetration of organizational messages and levels of understanding of definitions and meanings
Why The COVID World Needs A More Actionable Approach To Employee Research
With Great Depression-level financial straits being felt or anticipated for most world economies, corporations and organizations will face hard choices. Investments will need to be justified by anticipated results.
At a basic level, interventions that identify specific opportunities for improvement provide a pathway for action and perhaps can highlight actions with specific dollar figures attached. A business case is easier to make for reducing friction by identifying and addressing alignment issues, reducing organizational noise by focusing information on key influencers and principal connections, or reducing ambiguity found in the definition of organizational purposes or operational goals, then it is for a boil-the-ocean survey exercise that is basically cosmetic and defensive.
In the volatile end-of-pandemic world, there is little margin for error, and there is much scope for improvement. It is no place for the old-school employee survey
What’s Next:
