Surveys: An Important Element of Any Employee Engagement Effort

Many companies today are evaluating various programs to boost employee engagement. There’s a good reason for this: American workers today are at record levels of disengagement with their jobs, and this costs company money in reduced productivity, lost opportunities and high turnover. Conventional wisdom (not to mention many studies) dictates that when employees are engaged with their jobs – that is, their personal goals and motivation line up well with the ongoing success of the company – companies reap a number of financial and customer service benefits.

While it’s one thing to acknowledge the problem, solving it is another. Organizations today are taking a number of steps to boost employee engagement with varying levels of success. According to Officevibe’s Jacob Shriar, writing for Business2Community, some of these efforts may in fact be hindering the effort. He refers to it as “the cobra effect,” which is a solution to a problem that makes things worse.

“The story goes, there was a major problem with venomous snakes in India, and when Britain took over, they wanted to get rid of them,” wrote Shriar. “So the solution to the problem was the offer up rewards for any dead snake, as an incentive to get rid of all of the snakes. What ended up happening was, many poorer Indians started breeding their own snakes in order to collect more income. When the government found out what was happening, they canceled the reward, and the Indians set all the snakes free, creating an even bigger problem.”

So what types of practices are making employee engagement problems worse? For starters, wrote Shriar, myths about employee surveys can impede the process. Managers who believe that offering financial or other incentives will work (in reality, it will simply turn what should be an information sharing process into a contest) or that only angry employees will respond are doing more harm than good when it comes to boosting engagement. Other managers may believe that senior executives won’t want to survey employees, afraid of what they might find, or that the result will be employees asking for more money. This latter belief assumes that employees don’t want to improve the organization.

“Remember, there are other things that motivate employees much more than money, like autonomy, mastery, and purpose,” wrote Shriar. “There are other ways to make employees happier, and if you’re smart about how you conduct your employee surveys, you can improve employee engagement without giving anyone more money.”

Keep in mind that employees want to do a better job, and they want to work for a successful company. They also like being listened to: after all, they’re the ones who spend their time on the company’s front lines. Employee surveys are a great and inexpensive way to find roadblocks to success in the organization, and skipping them for fear of the unknown will help no one.