Even when they have the best intentions, organizations can easily create “little monsters” when deciding to launch an employee survey. This article will explain how it can happen and how you can prevent it.
So, how can simply asking about employee satisfaction with aspects of their work environment make your employees become little monsters? The answer is simple. By asking your employees what they think about facets of their work environment, they begin to form opinions about them, even if they had never thought of those facets before. Sure, most employees have thought about things like their pay, or maybe even their opportunities for promotion, but if you ask about aspects of their work they hadn’t given a lot of thought to, they will begin to do so. For instance, let’s say you ask them about their satisfaction with parking. While some employees may have feelings about the parking situation, others may have never considered it. But by asking employees to respond to a question about parking satisfaction, your employees will not only be able to answer that question, but the question could spark additional thought on the matter that can, over time, morph from a somewhat neutral response to a strongly dissatisfied response. How? Let’s say you ask, “How satisfied are you about the parking at your job?” An employee may not have given that a lot of consideration in the past, so he/she shrugs and responds, ‘neither satisfied nor dissatisfied’. However, by simply asking the question, you have now encouraged the employee to think about that aspect of their work, so he/she begins to ask his/her friends about their parking situation. He/she may ask others, “how far away do you have to park”, or “how much do you have to pay for your parking downtown”. If the answers to those questions reveal the employee’s situation is not as favorable as those that were asked, the employee may then start to become more and more dissatisfied with their parking. In other words, because you have asked about parking satisfaction, you have ultimately created dissatisfaction in an area of the employee’s job in which they had no opinion prior to the employee survey. In essence, you have created a little monster.
So how can you prevent creating little monsters? Well, I suppose one answer might be to never conduct an employee survey. But the benefits obtained from such an endeavor outweigh the potential drawbacks if the employee survey is handled appropriately. Instead, employee surveys should always be accompanied by a clear dissemination of the employee results to each and every employee. By sharing the employee survey results with everyone, the organization will let their employees know that their voices were heard. This act will not only serve to enhance employee trust within the organization, but it will also result in higher response rates in future surveys.
But what if those employees indicate they are dissatisfied with the parking? Then the organization should react. Sometimes, that reaction can be informative. For instance, when presenting the results on the (lack of) satisfaction with parking, the organization could also include information that what their employees pay for parking is below the average for the area. And what if it’s above average? Bingo. You’ve got something to work on.
The bottom line is all of this is to be careful what you ask about on an employee survey. Only ask about aspects of the work environment you care about and are willing to change, or at least address. If you don’t care about something, then don’t ask about it. And that’s how you prevent your employees from becoming little monsters when conducting an employee survey.