Employee Engagement Survey: Initiative vs. Reward

CEOs don’t get many chances to hear the unfiltered voices of their employees. So when you’re conducting your next employee engagement survey, don’t let that opportunity slip by. Let me give a real-life example. Recently I worked with a tech company that had grown rapidly due to bold innovative thinking. But the CEO was concerned that they were losing their boldness and innovativeness. So I added 2 questions to their employee engagement survey… Bold innovative thinking is critical to ABC’s success. Bold innovative thinking is rewarded in ABC. When we got the data back, the CEO’s fears were confirmed. Here’s the chart for those 2 questions…  The first thing you should notice is the huge gap between “bold innovative thinking is required” and “bold innovative thinking is rewarded.” Getting a 6 on a 7-point scale is pretty good, so the CEO’s message about the need for innovation was reaching most of the employees. But the employees didn’t feel as though their boldness and innovation was being rewarded. And the 1.3-point gap between those two scores is absolutely huge on an employee engagement survey. Now, what’s the cause of this breakdown? To discover this, we ran a heatmap analysis that showed the scores for these questions broken-out by various managers. Here’s a simplified and sanitized version (to protect confidentiality): You can see that while Manager F seems to be doing a pretty good job (at least relatively),Managers A and D are experiencing large gaps between innovative thinking between critical and it being rewarded. This kind of analysis shouldn’t be used as some kind of witch-hunt; it’s not about finding dissenters and punishing them, rather it’s about identifying root causes and solving them.In one short conversation, it became clear that Manager A had received marching orders that were at odds with the concept of bold innovative thinking. And that conflict was easily resolved. By contrast, Manager D (a former programmer) was in over their head and just didn’t want to be a manager. So the CEO put them back into a programmer role where they thrived. This is just the tip of the iceberg. But I really want to make one simple point: Employee engagement surveys aren’t just for making employees feel good, they’re also for ensuring the success of your business. CEOs don’t get many opportunities to hear from every employee, nor do they get many opportunities to test the efficacy of their strategic initiatives. Not every CEO wants bold innovative thinking. But whatever your strategy, an employee engagement survey gives CEOs a rare opportunity to test whether their strategy has permeated every nook-and-cranny of the organization. And that’s how smart CEOs use employee engagement surveys.