Engaging the Workplace: Using Surveys to Spark Change

Unlock the Potential in Your Employee Survey

You spend months crafting the right survey questions and planning how to share the results with senior leaders and managers. Then you anxiously anticipate the responses. But once the data trickle in, nothing happens, no one acts, and your employees wait and wait for change.

What happened? When did the survey become just another "check the box" task for HR to administer and employees to fill out? In Engaging the Workplace: Using Surveys to Spark Change, Sarah R. Johnson has scanned the diminishing state of the organizational survey and reached a profound, yet simple, conclusion: Companies don't know why they want to conduct a survey and how they plan to act on its results.

As the big data movement took off, companies and their HR departments sought to capture, measure, and evaluate whatever data they could get their hands on. This led to more surveys—annual, semiannual, quarterly, pulse—all in the name of compiling more information and driving an engagement score. In theory, leaders could look at these frequent snapshots of how their employees were doing and determine what actions to take. But this increase in data has instead produced gridlock. Leaders put off next steps until the next survey and its results arrive, while employees lose faith in the survey's potential to make a difference.

With Engaging the Workplace, you can relaunch your survey process. When executed properly, the survey can enable leaders to make decisions based on data, rather than on fads, trends, or guesses. This means baking action planning into its design and ditching the one-size-fits-all trend in survey administration. After all, your company is not like any other. Use the survey to support the people analytics program you need and drive organizational excellence.

About the Author

Sarah Johnson is the vice president of enterprise surveys and analytics at Perceptyx, a leading survey consulting firm. Sarah has more than three decades of experience in her field. She specializes in employee engagement, organization development and effectiveness, and survey data analysis, advising senior leaders at Fortune 500 firms around the world.

Sarah has witnessed executives struggling across industries with such common challenges as guiding a global company through transformational change, leading successfully in turbulent times, and building employee engagement and retention among high-potential employees. Clients most often ask her how to leverage employee engagement to drive organization strategy. Her clients rely on her to capture the attention of senior leadership in a way that “makes the light bulb go off in their heads” when discussing employee engagement and alignment.

Sarah believes that companies need people who are not just book smart, but “maze bright”―people who can adapt to different cultures and continually changing circumstances, or as she puts it, who can “read the signs and figure out where to go from here.” Organizational surveys can provide those signs, and Sarah is committed to helping leaders and managers develop their ability to analyze and use the data strategically.