Dive Brief:
- HR teams may be relying on misleading employee engagement surveys to develop initiatives and make critical decisions about productivity and agility, according to a February report by people analytics firm Visier.
- Nearly half (47%) of 1,000 U.S.-based employees surveyed in October 2024 said they often or occasionally feel pressured to withhold feedback, and another 6% rarely or never answer honestly, the responses showed.
- Trust — or rather, a lack of it — in their organization’s data management system is the main culprit: 37% of employees said they don’t believe engagement surveys are ever really anonymous. They also said managers don’t get how they feel; 44% believe their manager would rate their emotional state differently than they would, while 21% said their manager would inflate it.
Dive Insight:
Employers have come to rely on surveys to gauge engagement, but the tool has been showing cracks for a while, according to the Visier report.
In other words, when surveys fail to accurately reflect employee sentiment, they won’t be effective in developing what’s needed to keep workers “engaged, productive and motivated to meet changing company needs,” Sarah Gonzales, Visier’s senior director of content, creative and design, wrote in a recent blog.
Pointedly, the top three subjects employees find the most difficult to be honest about — overall job satisfaction (36%), leadership performance (33%) and their relationship with their manager (30%) — directly impact how organizational strategy, programming and budgets are planned, Gonzales said.
Also of concern, dishonest responses are on the rise, particularly among younger, junior-level workers, the survey found.
For example, 26% of millennials and 24% of Gen Zers said they often feel pressured to hold back, compared to only 15% of Gen Xers.
The findings come at a time when U.S. employee engagement is at the lowest level in a decade, according to a January report from Gallup.
The forecast isn’t reassuring, the report indicated. Employee detachment is growing nationwide, particularly among workers under 35, and those in finance, technology, transportation and professional services, Gallup found.
The Visier survey highlighted another recurring problem: The disconnect between management and staff.
For instance, executives overestimate how much their employees trust them, a gap that has been growing in recent years, according to a PwC March 2024 report.
Notably, faulty engagement surveys may also be responsible for the disconnect between what HR teams prioritize and what employees believe is important for engagement, SurveyMonkey suggested in a September 2024 report.
The disconnect can vary by generation, geography, identity and parental status, but was most significant among companies that lacked strong feedback, advocacy and understanding of employee needs, SurveyMonkey found.
“To foster a productive engaged workforce, leaders can’t overlook opportunities to translate employee feedback into direct action,” but they’re “flying blind” without candid feedback, Gonzales emphasized in the Visier blog.
The firm’s findings shed light on how to move forward. In particular, the second most common reason employees said they aren’t being completely honest is that they don’t believe their employer will act on their feedback in a meaningful way.
However, employees were candid about what they’d like employers to do to improve productivity over the next 12 months. The No. 1 action? Thirty-one percent said they want regular updates on what their employer has done in response to their feedback.
Better communication and transparency about company changes are next as the most requested actions: More than a quarter (26%) of employees said they’d like to see improvements in these areas.
Around 1 in 10 respondents confessed that being honest in these types of surveys takes too long, Visier reported.
