Leadership IQ

This article is part 6 in a 6-part series on employee surveys. In part 5, Don’t Aim For Mediocrity, we revealed that by pushing people beyond their self-imposed limitations, you can help them achieve truly great results. Read parts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.

Too many companies complete the data collection piece and then wait three, four or even five months to get their data back. That’s simply too long. Employees took time out to sit down and give you some honest feedback, and they expect to know the results. When we sit on their responses for months on end, we may as well be saying, “Thanks for participating. Now we’re going to do whatever we’re going to do, and if we ever feel like telling you what that is, you’ll be towards the bottom of the list of the people we tell.” (That doesn’t do anything for the morale you are trying to improve via the employee survey.)

When you ask people to exert effort to take the survey, the least you can do is honor that effort and give them back some data. You don’t have to have every single regression run and every departmental data set completed, but you must let folks know the initial report/analysis has been received and that there’s a schedule for meetings where every employee can see or hear the results. If you wait three, four or five months to do this, people will either get irritated, or they’ll forget they even participated in taking the survey. And if they forget, they will have chalked it up to another one of the failed flavor-of-the-month initiatives the organization always tries, and your leaders’ credibility will be seriously hurt.

If you conduct an employee survey, spend as much (or more) effort on distributing and acting on the data as you did on collecting the data. And by the way, don’t ever let your survey provider tell you it takes months to process the data; it doesn’t (unless you’re at the bottom of their priority list).

Does your employee survey use a 5-point scale? Does it ask if your employees are “satisfied”? Chances are your employee survey is committing one of the “Deadly Sins of Employee Engagement Surveys.” Download our FREE white paper and find out now. Click here to learn more.

This article is part 5 in a 6-part series on employee surveys. In part 4, 10 Questions Is Not Enough, we revealed that it takes 25-30 questions to really figure out what motivates your unique group of employees. Read parts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6.

The book Hundred Percenters made the case that the key to success is tapping the unrealized Hundred Percenter potential of your employees. By pushing people beyond their self-imposed limitations, you can help them achieve truly great results and a depth of fulfillment previously unknown. And yet almost every employee survey in the world asks some version of the question, “Overall, I am satisfied with company ABC.” The only thing that will remain untapped in that question is the information you need, but won’t get.

Let’s imagine you score a perfect 7 out of 7 on this question (or even 5 out of 5 on your current survey). What does that really tell you? It says, “Absolutely, I am satisfied.” It does not say, “I will drip blood, sweat and tears to achieve this extraordinary goal in order to feel the addictive swell of pride and achievement.” It can’t say that, because you only asked if people felt satisfied. And being satisfied is a mediocre feeling when compared with the life-altering fulfillment that comes from giving 100%.

If I take my wife out for dinner and the manager comes by to ask if I’m satisfied, I could easily say yes and still never return to that restaurant. We have young kids, and our dinners out don’t happen three nights a week (we’ll get there again, but not right now), so we try to make our dates really special. I’ll be satisfied if the food and service are good, but if I only have two dates with my wife next month, I want our dinner to be more than satisfactory, I want it to be extraordinary. That’s my expectation. But the restaurant manager didn’t ask me if dinner was extraordinary; he only asked if it was satisfactory. I said yes because my food was delivered accurately and efficiently, but that doesn’t tell the manager I won’t be coming back again, or why. He only knows his staff didn’t mess things up so horribly that I might ask for a refund. If he had asked me if I was blown away, he’d have gotten a very different answer, one that would actually give him valuable feedback.

When you ask employees if they’re satisfied, you’re only asking whether things are so messed up that they might go running for the exits. You still have no idea if they might leave you for a different company that’s aiming for greatness. All you know is that things aren’t awful; your employees are satisfied. If you want to know if they are deeply fulfilled and committed to giving 100% to achieve your goals, you have to ask.

If you want to take your employees from ordinary to extraordinary, asking survey questions that inquire whether you’re 100% maxed out on making folks ordinary doesn’t serve that purpose. Why not ask your people how you’re doing on making them extraordinary?

Does your employee survey use a 5-point scale? Does it ask if your employees are “satisfied”? Chances are your employee survey is committing one of the “Deadly Sins of Employee Engagement Surveys.” Download our FREE white paper and find out now. Click here to learn more.

Read part 6, Employee Surveys: You’ve Got 28 Days, now.

This article is part 4 in a 6-part series on employee surveys. In part 3, Train Your Employees To Take Action, we revealed why it’s important to conduct employee surveys only if you’re prepared to follow up with training. Read parts 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6.

It doesn’t matter whether you ask nine questions on your survey or 10 or 12 or 14 questions. None of these numbers is likely to be big enough to help you figure out exactly what makes your unique group of employees tick.

We’ve run hundreds of regression analyses from similarly sized organizations that show that one group of employees is usually driven by radically different issues than another. For instance, a nurse in a small community hospital in Alabama is likely to have different motivational drivers than a stock trader on Wall Street, or a government employee, or a soldier in Iraq, or a Gen Y programmer in Silicon Valley. Just as a commissioned salesperson will have different motivational drivers than a Civil Service employee. Each of these folks made radically different career choices, and they all have radically different work schedules, workloads, compensation packages, missions, level of job risk, etc. So while some of these folks might do their job just fine without a best friend sitting next to them, others might be more motivated by taking on risky projects, or when given greater security and predictability.

It takes 25-30 questions to really figure out what motivates your unique group of employees. Sure, it’s fun and easy to ask 12 questions (and you might save 5 minutes on your survey). But who cares if it’s fast if the data you get completely misses the mark on the issues you need to know about?

If you go to the doctor and he takes an extra 5 minutes to do a really thorough diagnosis, are you going to be annoyed? Probably not. You took the time to drive there and get undressed, you might as well take a little extra time to get a medically accurate diagnosis. It’s no different with employee surveys.

Does your employee survey use a 5-point scale? Does it ask if your employees are “satisfied”? Chances are your employee survey is committing one of the “Deadly Sins of Employee Engagement Surveys.” Download our FREE white paper and find out now. Click here to learn more.

Read part 5, Employee Surveys: Don’t Aim For Mediocrity, now.

This article is part 3 in a 6-part series on employee surveys. In part 2, Don’t Ask Questions You Can’t Fix, we revealed that every question you ask in an employee survey implies a promise that you’re going to do something positive with the answer you get. And if you don’t, you’re setting the stage for your employees to doubt your leadership capabilities. Read parts 1, 2, 4, 5 and 6.

If you’ve read part two of this series (or even just the short note above), you already know that you shouldn’t ask questions in your employee surveys you can’t fix. Likewise, it’s important to conduct employee surveys only if you’re prepared to give your managers the specific tools needed to correct the issues identified in the survey.

Our research has found that it typically takes a minimum of two solid days of training to equip managers with enough skills to do the job effectively.

For example:

If your survey discovers that employees find performance feedback is weak, you need to teach managers how to deliver robust feedback.

If your survey discovers that employees don’t fully understand the goals set by their manager, you need to teach managers how to clearly set and communicate goals.

If your survey discovers that employees don’t think their manager holds low performers accountable, you need to teach managers how to hold low performers accountable. And so on.

We’ve seen more organizations than we care to count that conduct surveys without giving their managers all the specific skills and tools they need to implement the critical changes to improve employee engagement. The result is frustrated managers and irritated employees.

The reality is, if managers were ready to make all the necessary changes without any further training, they would have done it already.

Does your employee survey use a 5-point scale? Does it ask if your employees are “satisfied”? Chances are your employee survey is committing one of the “Deadly Sins of Employee Engagement Surveys.” Download our FREE white paper and find out now. Click here to learn more.

Read part 4, Employee Surveys: 10 Questions Is Not Enough, now.

This article is part 2 in a 6-part series on employee surveys. In part 1, Why 5-Point Scales Don’t Work, we revealed why 5-point scales tend to skew the results of employee surveys. Read parts 1, 3, 4, 5 and 6.

In employee surveys, every question you ask implies a promise that you’re going to do something positive with the answer you get. So if you don’t know exactly what actions will fix a situation, don’t ask a question about it until you do. Otherwise, you’re setting the stage for employees to doubt your leadership capabilities: “Gee, the boss asked how we felt about X, we all said lousy, and then he did nothing about it”.

Surveys commonly ask questions about whether employees have friends at work and whether they trust their boss. Let’s say you get low scores on those questions. Obviously, now you need to do something about it. Let’s start with the trust issue. Do you know specifically what causes the typical employee to trust the boss? How about what specifically causes your unique employees to trust the boss? And what steps have you taken to validate these issues?

We conducted one of the largest studies ever on just this topic: what makes employees trust their boss (hint: it’s not being honest and truthful). We discovered that the extent to which leaders respond constructively to employees who bring them work-related problems is the biggest driver of employee trust. This factor ranked significantly higher than whether or not the employees saw the boss as honest and truthful. And yet, there are a lot of organizations teaching managers to engender greater trust by being more honest, while other organizations are teaching managers to be more transparent in order to gain employee trust. What is the guaranteed solution to the problem? You won’t find an answer by asking a question like, “Do you trust your boss?”

Does your employee survey use a 5-point scale? Does it ask if your employees are “satisfied”? Chances are your employee survey is committing one of the “Deadly Sins of Employee Engagement Surveys.” Download our FREE white paper and find out now. Click here to learn more.

Similarly, low scores on a question that asks if employees have a good friend at work don’t teach you exactly what steps you need to take to fix the issue. Social networking might improve friendships, but so might more teamwork or less teamwork, or spending more time together or less time together, etc. The solution might depend on your unique culture. Bottom line, if you really want to know what’s going to work for your folks, you’ve got to ask about those solutions specifically.

It should also be noted that factors like friendships and trust are means to an end; they are not the end themselves. The end is to get employees to willingly and passionately give 100% and to recruit people to come to the company and do the same. Maybe having friends at work is causally related to that; maybe it’s not. Maybe trust is causally related to that; maybe it’s not. Maybe open communication, doing interesting work, having good life balance, being autonomous or being in great teams are all related; but maybe they’re not. The trick is to figure out what’s truly related and ask about it in a way that gives you information about the specific actions you need to take.

On the Hundred-Percenter Index (Leadership IQ’s proprietary employee survey), every question asked includes a clear path of action. So if you discover an area you need to fix, you’ll immediately know what needs to be done. We’ll never ask employees if they trust their boss. However, we will ask if the boss responds constructively when presented with work-related problems. We’ll also never ask employees if they have a good friend at work. However, we will ask if the employee can successfully deliver constructive feedback to their coworkers.

The Hundred-Percenter Index has the solutions built right in, but the same cannot be said of most employee survey questions. To judge how effective your current employee survey really is, take a good look at every question on the survey, then ask yourself, “Do I know exactly what actions will fix this issue?” It’s not good enough to be able to guess what might work; you have to know with complete certainty what you will do. If you don’t have a definitive answer, the survey question has no value and needs to be dropped.

Does your employee survey use a 5-point scale? Does it ask if your employees are “satisfied”? Chances are your employee survey is committing one of the “Deadly Sins of Employee Engagement Surveys.” Download our FREE white paper and find out now. Click here to learn more.

Read part 3, Employee Surveys: Train Your Managers How to Take Action, now.

This article is part 1 in a 6-part series on employee surveys. Read parts 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.

In employee surveys (think of a Likert-type scale ranging from Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree), 5-point scale types are what you most commonly find.

And in many situations, 5-point scales are just fine. (Psychological and sociological researchers use them to great effect.) However, in the world of employee surveys, the 5-point scale has a fatal flaw.

Five-point scales were designed for situations where the data has a reasonable chance of being normally distributed; where there are decent odds that as many people will score 1s as they do 5s.

For example, if you asked 1,000 random people to rate the statement, “Orange is a more fashionable color than green,” you’re going to get a wide variety of responses. Some people hate orange, while others love it. The same goes for green. And then there are the folks who feel so-so about both colors. You could ask any number of questions and get a similarly wide spread of statements (e.g., The Yankees are the best baseball team. The best condiment for hot dogs is mustard. Red is a good color for cars. I feel happy today.). In all these situations, a 5-point scale works just fine because the responses will be so varied.

But inside an organization, the 5-point scale loses its effectiveness. Inside organizations, 5-point survey results tend to be skewed and have less variability than the population at large. In other words, you won’t get nearly as many 1s as 5s.

Does your employee survey use a 5-point scale? Does it ask if your employees are “satisfied”? Chances are your employee survey is committing one of the “Deadly Sins of Employee Engagement Surveys.” Download our FREE white paper and find out now. Click here to learn more.

If you ask a group of employees at ACME Inc. to rate the statement, “ACME is a good place to work,” you’re not going to get very many low responses (i.e., 1s and 2s). That’s because if you truly thought ACME was an awful place to work, you probably would have quit already. By virtue of being an employee at ACME, you’re saying, “Well, it can’t really be all that bad because I keep showing up.”

When you survey people who have said the company is decent (judging by the fact that they show up every day), your survey results will be skewed towards Strongly Agree, and there won’t be much variability in the responses. In the majority of the 5-point employee surveys we’ve seen, there really isn’t a 5-point scale; it’s more like a 3-point scale. Can you really say you’re using a 1-to-5 point scale if all the responses come out 3, 4 or 5?

Nobody in their right mind is going to use a 3-point scale for an employee survey. It would essentially limit the choices to: “Everything’s Bad,” “Everything’s Great,” or “It’s So-So.” And in the real world, things aren’t quite so black-and-white. There’s a notable difference between the grades A and a B, or between an A and a B+, or even an A and an A-. If you’re comfortable grading your organization on Pass/Fail, which is kind of what you’re doing when you get this very low spread of data, then go for it. But when an employee quits, it’s probably not for an “everything’s bad” reason, like the manager is the Devil incarnate, none of the computers work, and all my coworkers are low performing losers. It’s likely to be a bit more subtle than that; something the data results of a 5-point scale won’t even begin to reveal.

If your employees aren’t giving 100%, wouldn’t you like to know just how far away they are from 100%? Do you really want to limit yourself to, “It’s 100% or nothing?”

When I’ve held the position of CEO, I always wanted to know just how far away from 100% we really were. That’s what told me how many resources to mobilize and what specific actions to take. There’s a big difference between missing your sales targets by 1% and missing them by 50%. With a 5-point scale (which de facto becomes a 3 point scale), you’ll never know which it is; you’ll only know you missed your target.

This isn’t the only bad news about 5-point scales. When you conduct employee surveys every year (or two), ceiling effects and restriction of range your ability to track your progress. Employee surveys often assess very subtle issues, and the interventions that follow often make numerically small, but very significant, changes. But if you’re only getting 3 different responses, how do you see progress? Can you really assess your changes if your scale doesn’t distinguish between decent, good and great?

The easy resolution is a 7-point scale, which will accurately assess your employees. Now, it’s true that because you’re assessing a biased pool of respondents, you will still see some skewing on a 7-point scale (you won’t get lots of 1s and 2s). In fact, what you’ll end up with is basically a 5-point scale.

Does your employee survey use a 5-point scale? Does it ask if your employees are “satisfied”? Chances are your employee survey is committing one of the “Deadly Sins of Employee Engagement Surveys.” Download our FREE white paper and find out now. Click here to learn more.

Read part 2, Employee Surveys: Don’t Ask Questions You Can’t Fix, now.