Hello from Hamburg,
Company-wide employee satisfaction surveys are all the rage. At a time when remote work policies are being discussed everywhere, companies are desperately seeking workers, and the future looks uncertain, many company leaders want to ensure their employees’ motivation and boost the organization’s performance. At least, that’s the reasoning behind the high level of interest in these “pulse checks.” However, numerous studies have shown that they yield useful results in only about 20 percent of cases.
That’s not all that surprising, because what does satisfaction have to do with willingness to perform? What exactly is employee motivation, and how does it manifest itself? Through enthusiasm for work? Inner satisfaction? And is the level of this satisfaction a suitable indicator of declining turnover, rising motivation, and improved performance?
There are other questions that raise doubts about the validity and impact of employee surveys:
- Standard tools for such surveys fail to capture key factors that influence motivation: “Do my skills match the tasks I’m assigned?”, “How does my manager behave?”, “What is my current personal situation?”
- Employees who approach a survey with such doubts in the back of their minds will not see themselves reflected in it. They may then quickly extrapolate their individual feelings to form a broader perception of the situation within the company.
- Surveys reflect perceptions but reveal nothing about their causes. That is why some surveys ask about the reasons for a lack of engagement. However, most employees find it difficult to make such an assessment—and that is not their job, but rather a management responsibility.
In addition, there are numerous workmanship defects:
- There are too many questions, which undermines the sincerity of the responses.
- The quality of the questions leaves something to be desired. For example, what am I supposed to do with a poor result for the statement, “I have confidence in our company’s leadership”?
- Surveys often have no tangible consequences. A study by Professor Peter Cappelli of the Wharton Business School shows that, due to a lack of confidence in the effectiveness of employee surveys, about 70 percent of all employees do not participate in them at all, while 30 percent consider them pointless.
Why, then, are so many company executives pushing for such surveys right now? The goal is to make employees feel heard, especially in times of uncertainty. So are we trying to reassure them? Or are we expecting answers from them that we ourselves don’t have? If we don’t have at least a rough idea from the outset of what we hope to gain from the answers, we’d be better off not asking any questions at all. Otherwise, everyone is just groping around in the dark together. That amplifies the sense of disorientation exponentially.
More promising than general surveys are frequent, targeted flash polls on pressing topics conducted via open-source survey tools: “What skills would you like to develop so you can handle your new responsibilities?” “Can you share your problems with your manager? If not, why not?” “Name one frustration you experience in your day-to-day work that you believe your manager can resolve!” Based on the responses, company leadership selects a topic—for example, the company’s feedback culture—communicates its improvement as a priority for the next six months, and announces specific training initiatives to address it.
Ultimately, employee motivation comes down to the surprisingly simple yet challenging daily leadership task that every team leader faces. Veemind is a simple tool to help with this, but often, a sincere question asked in the morning by the coffee machine—"How are you? What's on your mind?"—can make all the difference.
