Employee surveys and employee engagement

“What gets measured gets done,” says one piece of business wisdom. “Weighing the pig doesn’t make it fatter,” says another. Both are right, which is why the debate about measuring employee engagement never quite resolves.

Einstein got closer than either: not everything that can be measured matters, and not everything that matters can be measured.

So before you send your team a survey, it’s worth being honest about which one you’re doing.

What employee engagement actually means

Employee engagement is the extent to which your people are:

• Committed to the goals and values of the business
• Motivated to contribute to its success
• Able to do both while their own wellbeing improves, not erodes

That last part is the one most owners skip. Engagement isn’t extracting more discretionary effort from people. If your team is committed and motivated but running on empty, you haven’t got engagement — you’ve got a countdown.

3 key questions before running employee surveys

Ask yourself these three, in order:

1. Does employee commitment and motivation actually matter to this business? If you genuinely don’t think it does, don’t run a survey — you won’t act on it, and asking people for their views and then ignoring them is worse than never asking.
2. Has the atmosphere in the office changed recently? Trust your instinct here. You usually feel it before you can name it.
3. Have your employees told you why it changed?

If you’ve asked directly and you still don’t have a clear answer, a survey is worth running. If you already know the answer, skip the survey and go fix the problem.

A survey is a tool for finding out what you don’t know. It’s not a substitute for the conversation you’ve been avoiding.

You don’t need to hire anyone

You do not need a consultant for this. Free tools like SurveyMonkey publish ready-made employee engagement templates with the questions already written — and those questions are designed to surface the issues sitting underneath the surface, which is exactly the bit that’s hard to write yourself.

Start there. Change the wording to sound like you, not like a textbook. That’s enough.

What gets measured gets done

Here’s where most businesses stop, and it’s why most surveys are a waste of everyone’s time. Measurement on its own changes nothing. The action is the point.

Once the results are in:

Share them with your employees. All of them, not just the flattering ones. If you only publish the good news, you’ve taught your team that the survey is a PR exercise and they’ll answer accordingly next time.

Ask questions to understand what you’re looking at. A score tells you there’s a problem; it doesn’t tell you what the problem is. Two phrases do most of the work here: “Tell me more” and “What do you mean by…”. Use them and then be quiet.

Agree concrete actions, together. Not a vague commitment to “improve communication” — a specific thing, with a name against it and a date. Then do it, visibly.

This last step is the most important part of the whole process. It’s the difference between a survey that improves your business and a survey that quietly makes it worse.

The bottom line

Developing your employees is your growth strategy. Not a nice thing you do alongside it — the strategy itself. A survey is simply one way of finding out where to start.

Just don’t weigh the pig and call it a diet.