Why Employee Attitude Surveys Fail

Most larger companies conduct employee attitude surveys on an occasional, if not on a regular basis. The senior management people in these organizations will tell you that their commitment to surveying their employees is indicative of their concern for their people. They will also tell you that they believe that the survey process should result in well motivated employees who are productive and quality conscious. In spite of this, these managers are often perplexed because, no matter how many surveys they conduct, morale, productivity and quality do not improve.

In this article, I will attempt to outline some of the errors companies make when they survey their employees and I will suggest ways of conducting a survey which will lead to meaningful changes and a well motivated and productive work force.

Conditions for Conducting a Survey

Many of the causes of unsuccessful survey efforts can be traced to the conditions under which management does surveys. Often Human Resource executives initiate employee attitude surveys in order to discover ways to improve the work environment of their employees. However, too often senior management's full commitment to the process and to making meaningful changes has not been obtained before hand. As a result, management is not prepared to act on the survey findings. In time, as these organizations continue to do surveys without providing feedback and/or acting on the findings, employees become increasingly dissatisfied and cynical about management's motives.

A second common unsuccessful scenario is that management wants to find out how the organization is doing compared to other similar organizations. If the organization scores more or less average, management feels there is no need to make changes; and even when the results are poor, management often rationalizes that considering the circumstances in which the survey was done (business downturn, high turnover, etc.) they did not do so badly and no changes are made. In either case the problem is that there are always some areas of dissatisfaction and to raise expectations by doing a survey and then to not make any improvements is demoralizing.

In yet other companies management conducts employee attitude surveys in order to find scapegoats. In this case, management uses an employee attitude survey to find the areas of greatest dissatisfaction and then fires the managers responsible for those areas. In this situation too the morale of both employees and managers will decline.

The only good condition for doing an employee attitude survey is when senior management (and not just the HR department) wants to find and solve the problems that employees are facing in their work environment.

Types of Survey Instruments

The first question is whether you should use a custom product (whether designed by a consultant or developed by your HR department) or an off the shelf tool. At first glance a tool custom designed for your organization would seem to be a better choice.

A custom survey will have questions primarily related to areas where management feels there are problems. However, if management knows where most of the problems lie, why bother with a survey? In fact, some of the most serious problems in an organization are often those of which management is totally unaware and these are unlikely to be revealed by a custom survey.

The opposite problem can also occur with custom surveys. The management will often decide that to ask certain questions would be to open a "can of worms" and therefore will leave out the most pertinent and revealing questions. For both of the above reasons, I recommend using an off the shelf tool. It may be desirable to customize the tool by removing or changing a few irrelevant questions and/or by using the appropriate terms for words like boss, department head, supervisor, etc., but that should be the extent of any customization.

In terms of topics which should be covered, it is recommended that the survey be as comprehensive as possible so that no problems will be undetected. There should also be an emphasis on dimensions related to Maslow's higher order needs (eg. autonomy, control, innovation, interpersonal harmony, etc.) because these are the areas which most affect employee morale.

In order to have a comprehensive tool and still keep the survey to a manageable length, it is best that the questions be as general as possible. For example, ask if employees have the freedom to do their jobs in the way that they feel is best. Do not ask if project status reports should be less detailed or produced less often. The specific problems and solutions can be uncovered in feedback and discussion sessions, after the survey has been completed.

Whom Should You Survey?

Obviously it is best to survey all workers in an organization. However, the question of the level at which the data should be summarized still remains. Should it be at the level of the plant, the division, the entire company or at the level of each manager's work group? In my experience, I have found that at least 50% of the problems that workers have are related to factors which are under the control of the workers' immediate boss. If the survey data is not analyzed at the level of each manager's work group, then these problems will not be detected.

It is also very important that the managerial work groups (ie. the groups of managers reporting to directors, the groups of directors reporting to VPs and even the group of VPs reporting to the President) be surveyed as well. Problems that managers have can also affect motivation and morale. One can hardly expect poorly motivated managers to inspire their people. Moreover, if the surveyed managers get good feedback and participate in the development of their bosses' action plans they will be much more likely to do a good job providing feedback to and developing action plans with their subordinates.

Timing

Properly conducted surveys can be extremely beneficial to an organization but there are times when an employee attitude survey should not be run. It should not be run during major labor negotiations, strikes, corporate restructuring, downsizing, nor during summer and Christmas vacation periods. Aside from these major disruptions, companies should not wait for just the right time to do a survey. The earlier a survey is conducted, the sooner the plans can be developed to tackle any existing problems that are be revealed.

Surveys, even if they encompass entire large corporations, should be both run and analyzed over a three week period. This ensures that employees get feedback while they still remember the survey. In order to do this it is necessary to use a computerized survey tool (whether purchased or developed in house). An excellent tool is our own Survey Tools for Windows. It allows you to easily and cost effectively design, administer and analyze professional employee surveys.

Once a survey is run, subsequent surveys should be run at the same time each year. Annual surveys are the only way to monitor changes in employee morale and motivation. In addition, when managers know that their groups will be surveyed every year, they have an incentive to improve the working conditions of their subordinates.

Feedback and More Feedback

One of the major reasons why surveys fail is that employees are left with the impression that nothing was ever done with the survey results. In some cases this is true; in other cases the wrong things were done; and in some situations, proper steps were taken but employees did not recognize the relation between the steps that were taken and the survey.

As mentioned previously, running and analyzing the survey should take a maximum of three weeks. The remaining feedback and action plan development steps should take a maximum of five more weeks.

After the survey results have been generated, the Survey Administrator should meet with each of the managers and review the findings. At the same time the Administrator should also coach the managers on how to conduct the Feedback I meeting in which each manager presents the findings to his or her group.

During the Feedback I meeting, the manager should present the findings in an open and non defensive manner. He should use the findings as a catalyst to get the group to open up and to help him understand the specific problems that led to the survey results. For example, if the findings indicate that the group is unhappy with the state of disorganization that exists, the manager should try to find out exactly which things are disorganized. He should also, in a brainstorming manner, ask for all the possible solutions to the problems that have been revealed. The manager should not comment on the proposed solutions at that time but simply record them.

After the meeting the manager should prepare a three part report for the Survey Administrator. He should indicate the specific problems that are in his area, his action plan for the next 12 months and his recommendations to senior management for changes which are outside the manager's control.

The Survey Administrator should collect the third part of each manager's report and use it to prepare a set of recommendations for senior management. Senior management should then prepare its action plan for the coming year and communicate it to management.

During the Feedback II sessions each manager should give his or her people, both his action plan and the senior management's action plan. It is important to remember that all problems revealed by the survey do not have to be addressed by the action plans. It is quite sufficient to address some of the problems and to leave others for a future year's action plans. The important thing is to do as much as possible given time and budget constraints.

The major benefits of the above model are:

• Employees get prompt feedback regarding the survey results
• Employees' input is sought and used to get a full understanding of the problems
• Employees' recommendations for improvements are seriously considered
• Employees get prompt feedback regarding management's action plans at all levels
• Managers, as employees of their respective bosses, get the same feedback and opportunities to propose solutions
• Management at all levels develop their own action plans and are therefore more committed to them
• The fact that each manager's action plan is known by his or her boss and employees and the fact that the process will be repeated in one year, encourages managers to implement their plans.

Measurement

It has been said that what gets measured gets done. This is only half true. While management's choice of things to measure tells employees where management's attention is focused, to be truly effective measurements must be accurate. A furniture manufacturer that measures productivity in the plant by the amount of scrap left over each day is not likely to remain in business very long. In the human resources area, many companies have instituted annual salary reviews which tie salary increases and promotions to the level of an employee's performance instead of to seniority or inflation. However, if the performance appraisal process is poor the company's objective of retaining and attracting first class people will not be met.

The same logic applies to employee attitude surveys. While many senior managers claim that their most important resource is their people and do conduct employee attitude surveys, few companies do so without making many of the errors discussed in this article. It is a failing which can and should be corrected because in the long run, the motivation level of a company's employees is the one measure which is most indicative of a company's ultimate success.