sarah r. johnson

Unlock the Potential in Your Employee Survey

You spend months crafting the right survey questions and planning how to share the results with senior leaders and managers. Then you anxiously anticipate the responses. But once the data trickle in, nothing happens, no one acts, and your employees wait and wait for change.

What happened? When did the survey become just another “check the box” task for HR to administer and employees to fill out? In Engaging the Workplace: Using Surveys to Spark Change, Sarah R. Johnson has scanned the diminishing state of the organizational survey and reached a profound, yet simple, conclusion: Companies don’t know why they want to conduct a survey and how they plan to act on its results.

As the big data movement took off, companies and their HR departments sought to capture, measure, and evaluate whatever data they could get their hands on. This led to more surveys—annual, semiannual, quarterly, pulse—all in the name of compiling more information and driving an engagement score. In theory, leaders could look at these frequent snapshots of how their employees were doing and determine what actions to take. But this increase in data has instead produced gridlock. Leaders put off next steps until the next survey and its results arrive, while employees lose faith in the survey’s potential to make a difference.

With Engaging the Workplace, you can relaunch your survey process. When executed properly, the survey can enable leaders to make decisions based on data, rather than on fads, trends, or guesses. This means baking action planning into its design and ditching the one-size-fits-all trend in survey administration. After all, your company is not like any other. Use the survey to support the people analytics program you need and drive organizational excellence.