How To Uncover The Hidden Insights Buried in Employee Survey Comments
If your employee engagement survey has an open-ended question at the end, and it should, you're in good company. A new report on employee surveys finds that most companies use one or two open-ended questions on their surveys. But sadly, more than three-quarters of companies say that they're not able to effectively harness those open-ended questions to move the needle on employee engagement.
The biggest reason that companies fail to take full advantage of the responses to those open-ended questions is that they don't think that hard about them. Imagine you ask an open-ended question like "Please describe any positive changes we could make to improve the work environment at ABC." Now suppose that an employee writes the following comment:
Many people here have been passed over for a position they've been trained to do or sometimes are doing in an interim capacity. But employees with no experience often get those positions because they were friends with the hiring manager. Or because the manager believes they can control them. Or because they won't expose the manager's inadequacies. This company has to start promoting employees with the experience and talent to serve the best interests of the company. And it feels terrible for an employee already doing the job to hear that they're not ready for this position and have the job go to someone with far less experience.
Far too many leaders read a comment like that and think, "ah, clearly this is a disgruntled employee who was passed over," or "it's just sour grapes," or "maybe they've got a point, but there's not much to be done about it."
The employee who wrote that comment is clearly annoyed and maybe even angry, but there's so much more happening in that response. They're obviously expressing dissatisfaction with the current promotion practices, and they're clearly feeling frustrated, demotivated and undervalued. But beyond that, they also have a strong sense of fairness and believe in a meritocracy, where people are promoted based on skills and experience rather than personal connections. They're clearly aware of the long-term negative effects on companies when promotions are based solely on personal connections.
Perhaps most importantly, while they're currently frustrated, they're also deeply invested in the well-being and success of the company and their colleagues. Perhaps they were passed over for a promotion, but their comment indicates a concern for more than themselves; they seem to be genuinely concerned about the company's other high performers who should be advancing.
Let's take another example; an employee wrote the following comment.
This organization is growing, but the number of people employed to keep it operating seems to be shrinking. Yes, there have been added efficiencies, but there is a breaking point at which productivity becomes negative due to overstretching our resources. Our department is greatly affected by a lack of resources.
Clearly, this employee is frustrated and dissatisfied with the decrease in employee numbers and the resulting lack of resources and productivity problems. But, like the previous comment, there's more going on here. There are strong clues that this person is feeling overworked and headed towards, or already experiencing, burnout. Additionally, this is likely a person with a more logical and methodical approach to change, with a concern for seeing that work is done correctly and with high quality.
If an executive read through all the employees' open-ended responses and saw that theme emerge a few dozen times, they would learn everything they needed to know about how best to roll out changes at the company (i.e., methodically, logically and with a priority on preventing quality breakdowns).
The point of these examples is simply to highlight that there's a treasure trove of insight buried within employees' responses to open-ended survey questions. It takes a bit of time and practice to uncover that insight, but the end result is well worth the effort.
