Employee experience surveys can generate a lot of data, which typically is analyzed in lengthy reports. But too often that data may not be telling you the whole story or even a true story. If you want to truly understand your employees’ attitudes and feelings, you need to look beyond the data in search of genuinely new insights—that are both a new understanding of issues facing your organization and the business implications of your discovery.
I’m going to share three steps that can help you gain a much clearer insight into your employees. To illustrate, let’s look at the following example of how one HR team attained valuable new insight about mid-level employees’ mindsets and emotions.
Step 1: Look for Mixed Messages
When a Human Resources (HR) team analyzed the data from their annual employee experience survey, the picture from mid-level staffers looked rosy: High ratings were given to employee-management engagement and to managers’ fairness, openness, timeliness, and adherence to confidentiality. These ratings reflected a consistently high level of trust in mid-level management.
But when the HR team reviewed the comments in response to some open-ended questions, several hints of dissatisfaction caught their eye. The team was puzzled by this discrepancy, so they decided to conduct interviews with a sampling of employees to get a better understanding of the source and the prevalence of that dissatisfaction.
Very quickly, a disturbing pattern emerged revealing that many employees were deeply concerned about the future of the firm. Although the company was profitable, rumors had circulated that the firm would be sold, possibly to a well-known private equity firm with a reputation for cost-cutting and headcount reduction. And at a recent town hall meeting, the employees felt senior executives had been less than forthcoming when pressed to address the rumors.
Although mid-level staffers felt generally positive about their management, it became clear that many of them were becoming preoccupied with feelings of insecurity and anxiety, leading them to question both publicly and privately the future of the company and their jobs.
By noticing the mixed messages between the positive ratings and the negative comments, the HR team was able to probe deeper and attain the valuable new understanding that mid-level employees’ anxiety about the future of the firm was beginning to overwhelm their positive emotions, which, in time, could lead to a less productive workforce and ultimately higher turnover.
Step 2: Look More Closely at What Has Changed
Once you’ve attained a truly new understanding, it’s beneficial to examine how your new perception actually differs from your old view. Sometimes this is not easy because your previous convictions may not have been explicitly articulated. In our case example, the HR analysis team found it helpful to ask questions such as these:
- Why is the new understanding surprising to us?
- What did we previously believe about the mid-level employees’ commitment to the firm?
- What did we write in previous reports about employees’ trust in their management?
- In our prior presentations, what was implicit about employees’ beliefs in the enterprise?
After extensive deliberations, the HR team decided that their old understanding could be expressed this way: “Our mid-level staffers are generally satisfied, with little or no concern about the future of the organization or their roles in it.” As a result, the HR team had not seen any need to engage in preemptive interventions to solve a problem that did not exist.
Step 3: Decide Where to Go from Here
Once you realize how your employees’ attitudes have changed you’ll need to adjust your assumptions and then decide how best to address the new challenge you’ve discovered.
Adjust your outlook: When the HR team identified the employees’ increasing anxiety, it raised some fundamental challenges to the HR team’s (and the organization’s) assumptions and beliefs. In light of the new picture, the HR and line managers realized they needed to take into consideration employees’ emotional well-being. Indeed, they now had to assume that unless they directly addressed the negative emotions, those feelings were likely to become more pervasive, adversely affecting the work experience for both employees and managers.
Any major new assumption is rarely an isolated belief but nearly always impacts several other of your assumptions. For example, the HR team realized that if employees’ anxiety was rising, it was no longer safe to assume that employees and managers would engage with each other in their traditional relationships of mutual trust.
Similarly, employee development and training managers had believed that prior programs were continuing to strengthen trust levels throughout the organization—a belief that now must be reexamined. The mid-level managers also realized they needed to revisit their implicit belief that the town halls they regularly hold with employees are sufficient to take care of any lingering trust issues.
Consider your options: Your new understanding may give rise to options that previously were not on the radar screen. For example, after recognizing the rising anxiety among employees, the HR team considered a new option: conducting another type of survey using a novel methodology to document employees’ positive and negative emotions and assess the impact of those emotions on employee behaviors.
As a result of discovering the increasingly pervasive negative emotions, the HR team and senior managers considered how to address directly issues of trust between employees and managers in future employee development programs. Also, past decisions often need to be revisited. For example, a past decision not to organize a workshop for middle and senior managers on leading and motivating employees now may be seen in a different light due to the new understanding.
Take action that hits the right target: Equipped with your new understanding of the situation and an awareness of a broader range of options, you can decide what to do to address the real issues effectively. In this case, the HR team decided to offer a workshop and possibly an “open forum” to directly address employees’ concerns and help them understand how to build more positive emotions and restore trust between management and employees.
By looking beyond the data from your surveys, you can ferret out critical underlying issues and gain true insight into how you can best address obstacles before they become a barrier to the success of your organization.
