Stop Annoying Your Employees
We’ve all done it – started with the best of intentions, and after thousands of hours and dollars spent, found ourselves no closer to our goal or objective. In a corporate setting, especially a large enterprise environment, this experience can often seem the norm and not the outlier.
We can’t be experts in everything, so we look to external consultants and the latest and greatest new software, to help us understand our culture, employee motivations, and raise levels of engagement in our organization. In that quest, we often lose sight of the fact that consultants exist to sell services, and software companies exist to sell software. They may honestly believe that they can help you successfully toward whatever goals or objectives you have and though many work environments share similarities, there are novel aspects that only people functioning within will understand.
Employee surveying became the “hip thing” back in the late-90s, and has continued to expand, even though the outcomes and results have been mixed, at best. The inherent bias, uneven power dynamics, and inability to turn insight into valuable action make the process of constantly “pinging” your employees with questions of low to moderate value. It gets even worse when employees honestly respond to these surveys, but see no improvement in their day-to-day, the impact can actually be more harmful than positive.
At SkillDivvy, we believe in creating tools that function transparently, deliver value immediately to all groups involved, and produce data that is simply understood and actionable. Surveys can produce these outcomes, but it does require a specific skill set to successfully roll out and manage those initiatives. If you choose to head down the survey path, the below article gives some recommendations to keep in mind during your journey.