Six Questions to Demand of Your Employee Survey
Annual employee attitude surveys make good sense as a way to develop managers. They can also be a proactive tool for reducing personnel costs, enhancing service quality, and ultimately enhancing company profitability. The problem is that most employee surveys marketed by consultants cannot achieve these goals. Though they usually look good to the untrained eye, their effectiveness is limited by flaws in their planning, their measurement, and their implementation.
Following are six questions you should demand of your employee survey. If you cannot get satisfactory answers, think seriously about switching.
1 Has your survey shown a clear link between scores and operational and financial outcomes?
This question is important, because it tells you whether you have your hands on a lever you can use to improve your company’s performance. If you control surveys for 40 or more business units, you can run the test yourself. If not, use a survey that has been tested with employee responses and operational outcomes from at least 40 business units, preferably twice that number or more. Ideally that previous test should be in a similar business to your own. Do not expect a one-to-one correspondence between employee survey scores and financial outcomes. Profits, recall, are also affected by location, pricing, overhead, marketing, and a host of other factors. However, good surveys have shown statistically strong links to employee turnover, guest/customer satisfaction, and profitability.
If your survey has shown such links, great. Consider rewarding managers partly for the employee scores they generate. Such incentives are investments in the long-term health of your business. If your survey cannot show such links, maybe your survey scores are not measuring what you think they are.
2 Are you asking the right questions?
Most surveys focus on employee satisfaction with various aspects of the workplace. Satisfaction is important. However, there are other attitudes that are often more important for driving employee retention, customer service and profitability. Like how much employees care about the company and take pride in it, how much they trust their managers and their managers’ words, how well they think the company lives up to its obligations, and their perceptions of fairness, to name just a few. Consider which elements are central to your idea of excellent management.
Also, avoid asking questions that do not line up with your company’s direction – for example, do not ask about empowerment unless you intend to empower workers. Otherwise, you risk raising false expectations.
3 Related to the above question is a broader one: What is your performance model?
A well-crafted survey should measure each link in a chain of impact. For instance, a recent survey I conducted proposed that (a) employee perceptions of managers’ behavioral integrity affected (b) their commitment to the company, which affected (c) their intent to remain, which affected (d) employee turnover. Commitment also affected (e) discretionary service, which affected (e) guest satisfaction. Guest Satisfaction and employee turnover affected (f) profitability. This proposed chain was supported by the actual data at at 76 hotels. When you plan and measure all the links, then you can systematically intervene to improve outcomes, and you can measure the cost-effectiveness of your efforts.
4 How precise is your measurement?
This issue is probably the single most common cause of survey failures. I have heard seasoned, well-heeled consultants say that scientific standards of precision are not needed in the “real world.” However, in a recent study of 76 hotels, I found that 1/4 point difference in a critical employee attitude was associated with about $250,000/year potential profit for each business unit. With that kind of money on the line, it pays to be precise.
Management researchers agree about what it takes to get clear and accurate measurement of attitudes. Here are a few keys:
a) NEVER rely on a single question to measure an attitude. There should be at least three questions that approach the attitude with different wording, and responses to the questions should be averaged for each respondent. How well the question responses converge is measured with a statistic called, “alpha.” For a good question set, alpha must be above .70.
b) Where possible, use question sets that have been developed and tested for both clarity and for links to performance outcomes. Such work is a primary goal of management researchers, and you can find this kind of information in published articles. You have to know where to look, but you can avoid “reinventing the wheel.”
c) Are you using questions that measure several different underlying attitudes and beliefs, or just one? A statistical technique called, “factor analysis” should be applied to employee survey responses to explore this question. On an “exploratory factor analysis with oblique rotation,” your questions should score higher than .6 on the desired underlying attitude, and lower than .3 on the others. If your survey only measures a single attitude, you are missing the chance to learn a lot more about your employees. People are more complicated than a single “satisfaction” attitude can measure. One can also measure also employee commitment to the company, their beliefs about what is expected of them and what the company rewards, and a host of other important perceptions.
5 Are you throwing away information?
Many feedback reports will say, for example, “65% of your employees said they were satisfied or very satisfied with their supervision.” Feels nice to hear. However, when reports combine categories in this way, they throw away information, and they convey to managers the message that “good” is good enough. If your goal is to promote excellence, use ALL your information, and report employee averages.
6 How well are you preserving employees’ confidentiality?
Almost any employee survey will protect – or simply not ask – individual employees’ names. However, many surveys break confidentiality by reporting too much information. The big villain here is the “response breakdown.” A supervisor of seven who is told, for example, that three employees rated her a “5”, two said “4,” and two said “2” is more likely to think about identifying her critics than about becoming a better manager. And what is worse, she can probably guess who her harshest critics were. Employees facing such a survey quickly learn to censor their comments to say what the bosses want to hear. The resulting protective cynicism can spread through the whole hotel and can render an otherwise good survey useless.
The bottom line is that crafting and running an effective employee survey is harder than it looks. Even surveys produced by expensive and well-established consulting companies often lack the clarity of planning and the precision of measurement that yield strong links to your company’s bottom line. And if your survey results do not link up to the bottom line, then why are you doing a survey in the first place?
