Dear Liz,
I am the HR Manager in a legal services firm and I've got my hands full. It's a good company but before I arrived here one year ago, they went through several reorganizations and leadership changes and since I got here there have been more changes.
My CEO suggested that we conduct an Employee Engagement Survey but I think that might just frustrate our employees even more. In my experience when people are upset, they don't want to fill out a survey. They want to hear from their leaders directly and also have the opportunity to ask questions and get solid answers.
I can tell that our team members are unhappy and I'm not sure how to begin to address their concerns. Thanks in advance for your help Liz -
Yours,
Chyra
Dear Chyra,
Your instinct is right on target. Employee Engagement Surveys are pointless and insulting. There are better ways to take the pulse of your organization!
Would you want your spouse or romantic partner to hand you a survey to complete, in order to inform him or her of your feelings about the relationship? No way! Handing someone a survey tells them that they are on a lower plane than you are. If you and they were on the same plane, they would simply ask you "Are you happy with our relationship? What do you need from me that you are not already getting?"
Employee Engagement Surveys are cynical attempts on the part of an HR team or leadership group to say "Look, we're doing our jobs!" when in fact they are not doing their jobs at all. Obviously, in a "confidential" survey your employees can't give you detailed feedback about their individual or department-level concerns -- not in a way that would allow you to address those concerns directly.
So what good is the survey? It's just a way to give the company's leadership a fake report card that says "Our team is doing fine." If you really want to know how people are feeling, you have to listen to them.
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As you suggested, you can host Town Hall meetings (in person or virtually) and get your teammates talking that way. If the air is still too thick for that to happen -- that is, if people are afraid to speak up in a large group, because they've seen other people get their heads lopped off for doing the same thing -- your supervisors can talk with their teammates one-on-one or in small groups.
I did this for years in all of my HR jobs and I learned a tremendous amount. We don't have to make the process of listening to our employees a bureaucratic exercise. We can be human in our pulse-taking activities, and we must if we want our employees to be honest with us!
If you pay fair wages, treat people well, give them visibility into the future of the organization, give them latitude to their job their own way and generally respect them as people with obligations inside and outside of work, you're not likely to have very many unhappy employees.
If on the other hand you treat people like children or criminals, keep them guessing as to the stability of their jobs, pay them less-than-market salaries and continually remind them that they are easily-replaceable cogs in your machine, they won't like it! That's Leadership 101. Here are 25 common reasons employees are fed up:
1. They work too hard for too little reward.
2. They are constantly measured and evaluated (or even worse, stacked and ranked relative to one another)!
3. They are hemmed in by bureaucratic rules and policies.
4. They see no way to advance professionally in your organization.
5. They are led by inexperienced and insensitive supervisors who don't trust themselves enough to trust their employees.
6. They are criticized often but seldom acknowledged or praised.
7. They are kept in the dark about the organization's plans.
8. They see incompetent people promoted while more capable employees are ignored or dismissed.
9. They are treated as numbers rather than people.
10. Their family and "life" obligations are overlooked.
11. They are required to work too many hours and given little flexibility in their schedules.
12. They are not allowed to bring themselves fully to work. They are forced to pretend to be someone they're not, just to keep their job.
13. They are bombarded with corporate announcements and insulting Employee Engagement Surveys when it would be so much easier and more intelligent for their managers simply to talk with them and listen to them.
14. They are tired of constant management changes and reorganizations that never seem to address the company's real problems.
15. They have no visibility into the company's or the department's future plans.
16. They are held responsible for problems that they have no control over.
17. They have no support systems to help them when they need help on the job -- neither their manager nor their HR folks are effective advocates for them.
18. They see favoritism and politics influencing personnel decisions instead of brains and ability.
19. They know that it's not safe to talk about the company's culture problems openly, so they keep their mouths shut.
20. They don't trust their leaders to do the right thing, either for the employees or for your company's customers.
21. They are sick and tired of walking on eggshells to avoid offending a supervisor or higher-up manager.
22. Their good ideas are brushed aside.
23. Their work isn't fun or interesting.
24. The goals they've been assigned aren't realistic given the real (but unaddressed) problems in the energy field at work.
25. They don't trust you.
These problems are common in large and small organizations, and they won't get fixed by sending around a survey! Somebody has to break the ice and tell the truth to your leaders -- so why not you? Maybe the reason Mother Nature put you into this job was so that you could find your voice and tell your CEO that an Employee Engagement Survey is the last thing you need right now.
Your leaders need to get real and start listening to their employees one-on-one, one-on-two and one-on-six, whatever makes sense in each department. Your managers need to open up and share their own concerns with the CEO, too. You can't be the lone voice of reason in your company, or nothing will change.
A great place for you to start is by asking your CEO what frustrates him or her. Very often a frustrated CEO will say "I wish these employees would tell us what's wrong!" If your CEO says that, you can say "We have to ask them, and we have to do it in a respectful, human way if we want them to be honest with us."
That's not a survey. It's a lot of conversations. What better use of our managers' time could there possibly be than to listen?"
All the best, Chyra --
Liz
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