The secrets to a good employee survey

“This sentence is false” is an example of a logical inconsistency known as the liar paradox. If this sentence is true, then it is indeed false. But if this sentence is false, then it must be true. This is the kind of thing that makes philosophers go weak at the knees and gives normal people a headache.

A small echo of the liar paradox can be heard in a ritual of modern management: the annual employee survey. Imagine being asked to react to this statement: “This survey is a complete waste of time.” If enough people Strongly Agree with this proposition, then it’s probably true. But if a company is the kind of place where employees are prepared to give such honest feedback, then isn’t it likely to be false?

Employee surveys are a staple of corporate life. Knowing what workers are thinking is an important goal. High employee churn imposes financial and operational costs. There is lots of research to suggest that employee satisfaction leads to better financial outcomes. But set-piece surveys are really useful only if three conditions are met: they are properly designed, they are used in conjunction with other tools and they lead somewhere.

Among other things, proper design means grappling with the problem that employees are not necessarily incentivised to be honest. Faced with a Likert scale and the proposition that “My bosses have the communication skills of a banana,” you might Strongly Agree but still opt to Neither Agree Nor Disagree on your submitted form. Promises of confidentiality and anonymity can help, but only to a point.

Impression management, a fancy name for making yourself look good, can skew results on questions about things like job-safety practices. There are ways to mitigate this, however. A recent study by Emma Zaal of the University of Groningen and her co-authors found that using different survey formulations can have a big impact on responses. In a survey of Dutch adults, which asked questions like whether they had sent text messages while driving a car, the inclusion of face-saving options such as “occasionally” or “only when no other option” elicited a very different set of answers from binary “yes” or “no” options.

Employers can look at unvarnished feedback, most obviously on workplace-review sites such as GlassDoor. Artificial intelligence has the ability to build a coherent picture out of a mass of unstructured comments. In one recent paper, Tom Reader and Alex Gillespie of the London School of Economics looked for evidence of high-pressure cultures in employee reviews of European firms. Reviews that suggested very ambitious targets and expediency in reaching them were predictive of companies experiencing a future corporate scandal.

Frequency is another aspect of good design. A lot can change in the space of a year; an annual survey is a long time to wait for an update on employee sentiment. Retrospective evaluations are also subject to biases like the peak-end rule, which describes how people overweight the most extreme and the closing moments of an experience when they recall it. In one famous experiment, Daniel Kahneman and others put volunteers through two unpleasant tasks: the first involved holding their hands in icy water for a minute, and the second for 90 seconds, though for the final 30 seconds the water’s temperature rose by a little. The first experience was objectively less painful but, given a choice, the second was the one people chose to repeat.

Shorter “pulse” surveys cannot eradicate these problems, but are a way to gather more timely data. HappyOrNot, a Finnish company that makes those smiley-face feedback terminals you see in airports and elsewhere, also installs its machines inside companies as a way of keeping track of employee sentiment on a daily or weekly basis.

Good design and multiple sources of information contribute to a successful employee survey. But nothing matters more than being seen to act on feedback. If you say that your bosses have the communication skills of a banana and then hear nothing back, you have the faint satisfaction of knowing you are right but not much else. Surveys that prompt no follow-up action deepen cynicism rather than enthusiasm.

All of which leads to another paradox. Surveys are most useful in organisations that care about what their employees think. But organisations that care about what their employees think often have less need for surveys.■