3 Reasons to Use Experts for Employee Engagement Surveys

Smart business leaders are always on the lookout for ways to reduce expenses, and we applaud their conscientious effort to save money. But “going cheap” on employee surveys, especially where employee engagement training is concerned is often not the best course of action.

There are three simple reasons why hiring outside third party experts is the way to go and, in the long run, save time, effort and dollars when measuring employee engagement:

1. For real answers, employees need to believe in confidentiality.No matter how often and loudly senior managers say that survey responses will be confidential, employees are hard pressed to believe them. Someone in the company has to review and compile the data. How can employees be absolutely open and truthful in their responses if they suspect some potential retribution for their honesty? 
   You need to select an outside expert who guarantees anonymity. Even then there is often pressure from leaders to look at specific and narrow results. Some years ago we were in a meeting that got rather heated because the business leaders felt they had a right to see some individual results of the survey they had paid for. It was only the integrity of the external survey administrator who maintained the confidentiality of the assessment…and it was not easy.
   


2. To interpret results and put them in context, leaders need benchmarks.It doesn’t do much good to learn from your internally-driven survey that employee engagement is at 67%. How does that measure up against similar companies in your industry? Only an external quality employee engagement research firm with access to data across industries, geographies and size can give you that helpful performance comparison. Then you will know how to interpret the numbers vis-à-vis your competition along with your unique business strategy, organizational culture and talent management strategy.
   
   
3. Survey questions need to be valid and designed by experts. Poorly written surveys lead to poor or insufficient data. Even if you know enough not to ask leading or loaded questions, are you sure you might not include a double-barreled question like, “How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with the work benefits and pay of your job?” Poorly worded questions can screw up the results. Rely upon experts who can ask questions in a way that provides actionable data and results. And even if you know how to create good questions, do you have the research to support that the questions actually measure and are correlated to employee engagement anchors like discretionary effort, advocacy and intent to stay?  Bad questions lead to bad data.  And bad data leads to bad decisions.  

If determining employee engagement is important enough to you and your talent management strategy, spend the time and effort to do it right.  If a survey is worth your employees’ time, it is worth your investment in hiring an external expert to help ensure meaningful results.

 Learn more at: http://www.lsaglobal.com/leading-for-employee-engagement/