Tailor-made over off-the-peg
Too often companies launch engagement surveys that are straight off the shelf of a big consulting firm. While that’s helpful for benchmarking with other companies, it doesn’t help in diagnosing unique aspects of your company’s own culture.
If you took your company’s logo off your engagement survey and compared it to 10 other companies’ engagement surveys, would you be able to identify which one was your own? Probably not. Most surveys use standardized questions so that your results can be compared with a database of results on nearly identical questions asked at other companies. This can be helpful in seeing if your own organization is better, the same or worse on various issues than other companies.
One way to personalize your engagement survey is to build it around your organization’s vision, mission and values.
However, this approach has a downside. It can describe your organization only on the criteria that are on the survey, and it might completely miss the key issues holding your own company back from its potential if those issues are not included in your survey questions.
Limitations to standardized questions
For example, if you were to be described only by the standardized criteria on a typical driver’s license, all anyone would know about you is your address, age, height, weight, hair color, eye color and need for wearing glasses. How well does that describe who you are as a person? It captures the externals, but none of the intrinsic elements of your character or
personality.
One way to personalize your engagement survey is to build it around your organization’s vision, mission and values. That way the measures you obtain will tell you how closely your organization is living up to its own aspirations, not just the average aspirations of other companies.
At my last corporate job, we introduced a unifying mission, vision and values for four businesses that we had acquired separately over a four-year period. During the meetings we conducted to introduce these to employees, many groups asked how we would measure our progress, or if these were just concepts we were going to talk about, but not do anything about.
We had already decided to introduce a company-wide employee survey as a way to gather feedback on what was going well and not so well, and to identify the differences among our companies. After the mission and values introduction, we completely overhauled the structure of the questionnaire, much against our consultant’s advice.
Use subheads based on values
First, we organized questions under visible subheads that matched the three parts of our mission and our 12 values. Because some of our values were phrased differently from most other companies’ (“humility”, “porous organization” instead of “communication” and “dignity of the individual” instead of “respect”), employees could tell as soon as they saw the survey that it was clearly going to measure progress on our mission and values.
We focused on behaviors rather than attitudes under the premise that much of culture is “the way we do things around here.”
The biggest challenge we had in crafting questions for our value of “sense of humor” was whether to have serious or humorous questions about humor. Not surprisingly, the consulting firm had no standardized questions to suggest on this value.
Focus on behaviors, not attitudes
The second aspect of the survey we changed was to convert all of the typical agree/disagree attitude questions into questions that measured the frequency of how often employees observed different behaviors being exhibited around them at the company. We focused on behaviors rather than attitudes under the premise that much of culture is “the way we do things around here.” While attitudes strongly shape behaviors, we were more concerned to measure the outcome from attitudes rather than the attitudes themselves.
After we saw the survey results, action plans to make improvements were developed at the work group level for relationship-based behaviors. Corporate addressed only things needing systemic changes, such as compensation plans or training programs. On some of the values that were commonly addressed by many work groups, our survey result improved about 20–25 percentage points in just one year.
Focusing engagement measures on your organization’s own aspirational behaviors can be a highly effective way to encourage positive changes.
Have your say
Do you use standardized questions in your engagement surveys or do you tailor the questions to your business? If you have taken both approaches, what pros and cons did you find for each? Share your stories below...
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DATA: Linking communication to financial results