If you have worked for a larger organisation you are sure to have participated in a staff engagement survey at some stage. There are now many different versions with each provider claiming to provide employers with unique insights into their workforce.

There is immense value to be had from asking staff what they think and taking a read out on the culture of the organisation. However I have some fundamental concerns.

As a result of some work I have been doing for a large company I needed to dig a little deeper. I sourced several very good articles and a book (see below). And yes I wasn’t alone. So what are my concerns?

1. Why do organisations rely on a survey once a year to find out what people think when they should be talking with their people on an ongoing basis about what is important to them and how together they can make the organisation a great place to work. We need to reintroduce the art of conversation back into the workplace.

2. Why is so much emphasis placed on post survey action planning and the aggregation of peoples suggestions up to the top? What this does is encourage people to offer their thinking, package it up and deliver it to management with a lovely bow on top along with the expectation that managment will then do something about their frustrations. My big beef is that what this does is externalise the responsibility for engagement on to managers. If nothing changes then you can blame the managers. At the end of the day there is only one person responsible for my engagement and that is me.

3. Why is it that there is a trend showing up across surveys of staff being dissatisfied with career opportunities in their organisations.  This obviously feeds in to the disengagement calculation with managers angsting over the low score on this dimension. Why am I not surprised with this trend? In my view we need to rethink the language we use in organisations around career. We continue to talk about pathways, we talk about succession as if opportunities actually exist, we have people set annual career development goals on the assumption they want to progress up the organisation etc. I would suggest there is a lot of organisational dishonesty around careers. We would be better off asking our employees how they see themselves making an ongoing contribution to the company.

So in conclusion, yes find out what your people think, but why not in addition to surveys have conversations with them, create the right environment and they will tell you. Yes talk about engagement but make it the responsibility of the individual and ask what they are doing each day. And finally get honest about your career conversations, talk with your people about the contribution they want to make and in what way they would like to make a difference. You may be surprised and find that your engagement scores lift!