Six reasons to start being really skeptical about employee engagement surveys and the scores they generate
“We have an engagement score of more than 90%. Why do we need to cater to a minority of malcontents?”
I’ve never heard any executive say this directly.
But given many organizations’ resistance to addressing organizational gaps around addressing negative feedback — even if constructive—or making needed changes to cultural practices or communication platforms, the value of engagement surveys is worth casting a skeptical eye upon.
Six reasons for skepticism
Here are six reasons to be increasingly skeptical of traditional employee engagement surveys and the results they yield.
1) Failure to predict the Great Resignation
A key reason for the persistence of traditional employee engagement surveys is a belief that employee engagement scores are a proxy for “flight risk” — the extent to which valued employees are likely to leave their jobs. But employee engagement surveys abjectly failed to detect the attrition trend called “the Great Resignation.”
While engagement survey results have been trending down globally for years, attrition became an issue even in companies with relatively high engagement scores.