Why Your Employee Engagement Survey isn't Working?

27th April 2022

Designing with Care and Insight, an excellent survey has subjects that are in line with the changing trends in employee engagement. Changing the way you conduct business at work can result in a significant increase in productivity and efficiency. Changing leadership styles, allowing employees greater authority, and holding frequent training sessions are all ways we can apply to increase employee engagement.

HR professionals and those in leadership roles in organizations are making a lot of blunders these days. They do not care to adapt to changing times and realize that workplace culture has developed much, and employee engagement and survey methodologies have evolved significantly. Yet they persist to use decade-long old, planned questionnaires.

In a Business Today article, It was reported that, Indians are 25% engaged at work, but that this is still significantly low; Employees in India are not thriving in their lives. Instead, they are involved at work, but the levels of engagement are still quite low. The International Truck And Engine Corporation decided to update the design of their old employee engagement survey criteria. The results of the update were exhilarating. The workforce responded more enthusiastically, jumping from 33% to 66%, indicating higher levels of employee engagement.

Problems With Employee Engagement Survey

• Measuring Satisfaction, not Engagement

  Employee engagement and employee happiness are obviously related. Yet they have various purposes and cater to different issues and possibilities that an organization comprises of.

  Satisfaction indicates that the employees enjoy their work and are optimistic about their future earnings and benefits.

  Here, engagement is different. They discuss the intrinsic motivation that drives employees to devote their time and energy to the company. It refers to an employee's willingness to work and how they see themselves in the organization. This is not measured in surveys, which leads to a conflation of the two

• Improper Usage of Dialogues

  Communication is one of the most crucial aspects of any business. hen leaders understand what to say and how to communicate effectively, the organization will be successful and the employees will be satisfied. It's crucial to use the right dialogues. If not done so, employees may believe that they are not included by their management, that their roles are unclear to them, and they might not be able to comprehend the workplace's plan owing to incorrect terminology.

• Only interacting with coworkers during survey time

  When you just contact and engage with employees during the engagement survey, it demonstrates that they are only cared for when there is a work emergency, and they begin to feel that they are not a part of the firm.

• You approach your survey as if it were a solution in and of itself

  Most individuals make the mistake of thinking that doing a survey is enough to promote employee engagement, but the real work begins once the survey is completed. When you complete a medical test, you begin working through the feedback of the results. It's the same with an employee engagement survey; After the solutions are considered, you begin working through the feedback of the survey results. Many organizations believe that completing a survey equals engagement. However, It's only the beginning

• Surveys that take a long time to complete

  The surveys are lengthy, and employees may not devote their entire attention to filling them out owing to job pressures, or they may become tired of completing them. Long surveys take a long time to complete, which might be another cause of slow work. Not everyone has the attention span to sit for an extended period of time and complete the survey.

• Inadequate planning and execution

  One of the reasons surveys fail is a lack of planning. Only when the survey is used effectively, which encompasses the what, why, and how of employee engagement, can it be the most powerful tool available. Employee appreciation, communication, and a list of benefit ideas are all included.

• Failure to share the results of earlier surveys

  One of the most serious issues the organization continues to face is the failure to remedy past mistakes. The entire purpose of the surveys is to reduce workplace errors and increase productivity. We obviously cannot disclose every response to a survey because of the issue of anonymity, but we may inform employees and managers about the main lessons learned from the survey in order to provide better feedback.

• Launching Witch Hunt

  We've all witnessed cases where individuals lose their jobs and experience antagonism in the workplace because of personal grudges. This might happen when a survey contains unfavorable input, and the leader or manager, rather than acting on the bad feedback, tries all he can to figure out where it originated from. This undermines the psychological safety connected with the survey's anonymity, which was previously assured, and the confidentiality here is hampered, causing employees to doubt the surveys.

• Ignoring Data That Isn't Confirming

  A leader notices statistics indicating that employees are dissatisfied with the way their work is managed. People at the organization want more frequent input from their bosses, such as coaching, and they require training to get there. The leader, on the other hand, is of a different mindset. Managers, she believes, can learn to do those things on their own, just as she did. It's simply a matter of enhancing the process when it comes to better performing management. So, she pushes ahead with a new system and decides that manager training is a waste of money, blindly ignoring the data that contradicts her account. As a result, despite the data warmings, sSix months later, she's still perplexed as to why people are unhappy with the modifications. This proves the point that Leaders' perceptions of "what's going on" in an organization very frequently differ from reality.

Solutions and Strategies

• 1) Engagement Metrics

  Instead of assessing satisfaction, leaders should focus on maintaining employee engagement, which can be improved by ensuring that the survey is up to date with new designs and that everything is planned in accordance with the organization's mission.

• 2) Making each and every leader responsible

  It is not just an HR's responsibility to handle the survey, but it is also the responsibility of every leader because they must operate as part of a team. Change will never happen without every leader's participation and responsibility. HR will be the one to promote communication and inform the managers of each team, but it will be the manager who will address the feedback to the employees.

• 3) Using effective dialogue

  One of the most crucial things is to use communication and language to interpret criticism. Positive language conveys a sense of security that employees are cared for.

• 4) Having a Plan for After the Survey

  After the survey is completed, the real job begins. Having a post-survey plan is extraordinarily beneficial. HR should be aware of any loopholes in the organization and ensure that they are reported to all managers so that they can be addressed.