employee engagement

Why No One Likes Surveys

Most people I’ve met don’t like taking them. But why?

By Jared Lafitte

Here are a few honest answers from actual people.

“If I take a survey it won’t contribute to change anyway. It’s just an empty HR formality.”

“I don’t trust that I can be honest. I’m afraid of my company retaliating. I basically just lie.”

“My company gave us financial incentives for answering the survey questions the way they wanted.”

I’ve never enjoyed company surveys. As a coach and consultant, I’ve used them, but I’ve never really liked them.

It’s hard to measure how someone’s feeling using a scale from 1 to 5. Human emotions are too complex. Human experiences are too multifaceted.

How can I really gauge what’s going on in someone’s mind, much less predict how they’ll behave, with a handful of answers filled with numbers or terms like “moderately true” or “I choose not to respond”?

I can’t. No one can. And for most surveys, it takes days, weeks, and sometimes months to sort through what responses mean.

By then, many of the people who took the survey in the first place aren’t even in the company anymore. Virtually everyone else who’s still there has changed their feelings because people’s feelings change every day.

You’ve seen the question…

“How has your experience here been over the last six months? Please answer on a scale from 1 to 5, with 5 being “Excellent.”

How can anyone compress six months of their life into a single number? How can I expect to make sense of that information and build a better company out of it?

Surveys shouldn’t be like this. In an ideal world… Surveys should ask questions that completely engage me, with a full understanding of what I’m going through. My response to a survey shouldn’t take weeks or months to interpret. It should be interpreted instantaneously, as if I were talking to real human being. A survey should learn what I’m feeling week by week and understand my state of mind as clearly as I do myself. A survey should help my leaders understand exactly not only what I’m feeling and my peers are feeling, but what actions to take as a result. A survey should be able to do this for tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people at the same time, delivering instantaneous results so leaders can spend less time gathering and analyzing and more time actually making people‘s lives better. Survey should be able to tell me what people are actually thinking and anticipate how disengaged they are and how likely they are to leave their company. As an entrepreneur and consultant who has worked with HR departments for the better part of the last decade, this is something I would have used if it existed. So I helped build it. And I’ve gotten some of the largest companies in the world to help me make it better.

employee engagement sentiment

Build Productive Employees Who Trust You

I will never forget the day I was finally asked to help manage the restaurant!
I began as a busser, moved up to a server and then got the chance to bartend, however, all of those promotions paled in comparison to the day my manager told me to begin helping him run things. The primary reason for this was the fact his assistant manager recently quit and he was dealing with personal issues at home. Regardless of the reasons, I felt in charge!

Immediately I jumped on the computer and began looking at spreadsheets and schedules. I double and triple checked the budgets and sales goals. We were not hitting our sales goals and shockingly were not even coming close. Time for me to save the day.

I jumped into action by creating new specials and changing the schedules to try and lean things a bit. I reduced the number of acceptable comps each server had and focused on upselling at all times. None of these were necessarily bad, however, I soon realized that I was poorly navigating this ship.

Less than a week into my tenure as “boss,” a small mutiny began. Finally, one of my good friends, and now a server that reports to me, called me out on my micromanagement and poor leadership. He literally stared me in the face and said he was going to quit if I did not change my approach…This was one of my best friends!

“Managing a restaurant is not as much about managing money as it is about managing people!”

I was stunned and hurt, however, this ended up being one of the most important days of my career because I learned that managing a restaurant is not as much about managing money as it is about managing people.

Poor communication is a prevalent issue for all restaurant managers. Furthermore, roughly 70-90 percent of communication is non-verbal and we live in a society today that relies heavily on electronic communication. Mandy.ai helps you pick up the non-verbal communication through any and all written text. Whether email, text messages or social media, Mandy serves as a consultant to augment your communication and guide you to be the best leader for your team.

By combining employee engagement and sentiment analysis, Mandy offers deep insights into what your team is feeling and thinking. By highlighting what is working as well as the issues most pertinent to your employees, Mandy guides you to resolve these issues and bridge the communication gap.

Mandy provides daily reports that track your progress and quantify these qualitative analytics. This allows you to monitor improvement and growth as you build a stronger team.

Ultimately, Mandy leverages you with the information you need to best lead your team. This new technology will not only increase your employee productivity but also reduce turnover. Keep in mind that a departing employee will cost you roughly $4,000! By keeping just one employee a year, Mandy delivers an amazing ROI.

Rethinking Employee Wellness: Speaking to the Mind