Engagement surveys: nothing ever changes and we’re not loving them

Staff are frustrated when criticisms are glossed over or swept under the carpet.

Sue Jauncey says Pulse aims to increase personal accountability and trust. Picture: Renee Nowytarger.

You know the drill. An engagement survey gets passed around the office. You receive memo after memo not only telling you it is essential for it to be filled out but also that it is confidential.

Reluctantly, you fill it out and wait a few months before you hear murmurs about the results, while a carefully worded email from HR points out the positives and ignores all the issues you and your colleagues have highlighted.

Nothing changes. No one-on-one discussions, no addressing the failings of poor internal communication, no clarity about the new structure in the office, no vision for the future.

“We have to ask ourselves honestly, have any engagement surveys or leadership programs resulted in bringing about the required change that is needed for your organisation to deliver its strategy?” Pulse Australasia founder and director Sue Jauncey says.

“Do they translate to significant business and cultural changes across the organisation? Do we spend more time reacting to these programs and results than responding by considering them in the context of the organisation’s strategic direction and purpose?”

Pulse Australasia is a boutique management consultancy that specialises in establishing the right culture and leaders to ensure maximum profitability.

“Culture is the cornerstone to a successful company, yet for some reason most companies ignore it,” Jauncey says. “Today the focus is all about staff engagement with leaders advised to measure engagement levels because a happy and engaged workforce is expected to increase productivity results.

“The theory, while varying in form and function, suggests that by increasing the discretionary effort of the individual employees we have more engaged and subsequently more productive employees.

“Do we really, however, understand the connections between the basis of these engagement results and what these results, focused on the individual, may be unintentionally reinforcing?”

An Aon Hewitt survey reported 57 per cent of staff did not trust their senior leadership teams, while a Hays Group survey last year reported only 11 per cent of 400 engagement professionals surveyed reported they had managed to use their engagement survey results to drive positive change.

The money out the door from disengaged employees is estimated to cost Australia more than $33 billion a year.

“The culture of entitlement is about individuals wanting their own personal needs met,” Jauncey says. “The engagement survey has long been one of the biggest culprits to reinforcing this phenomenon.

“A culture of entitlement has enjoyed a long and steady growth over the past 20 years and with this we have witnessed a decline in leadership confidence. This stands to reason, given a majority of leaders are also caught up in the wave of entitlement.

“A culture of entitlement is characterised by an inability to delay gratification, which fosters dissatisfaction in the workplace and a growing demand for an organisation to meet our emotional and financial needs — needs that are often unrealistic and out of control.”

But not everyone is against engagement surveys, with some organisations seeing them as a good point for starting conversations.

“Engagement surveys don’t always tell you what to do, they don’t always tell the details behind every answer, but they do help start a conversation about what’s working, what’s not, what do we need to do to fix it,” Envato human resources director James Law says. “And, most important, did we do enough to fix it, which you can ask the next time around.”

Envato runs a group of sites to help people get creative for web, print and video projects.

“At Envato we always try and act on the feedback we are given but we also try to not bite off more than we can chew,” Law says. “So we’ll pick one or two things and work on these, rather than 40, which you will never be able to achieve.”

One alternative to engagement surveys is Teamgage, an online service that helps large organisations identify engagement and performance barriers, and equips teams and managers at all levels to address those issues.

Enterprise Productivity Solutions — Code 360 senior manager Richard Wortley says Teamgage is based on a 20-second interface, which offers a low-touch experience for staff and managers, removing the need for painful, longwinded surveys.

“We don’t use engagement surveys any more because the process doesn’t work for us,” Wortley says. “Engagement surveys are too slow and you can’t follow up in a timely, actionable manner. That’s why we developed Teamgage, as the system is always on, letting us provide 20-second feedback, which we can review weekly.

“All the team feel that they have plenty of opportunity to share and exchange feedback.”

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Finger on the Pulse helps workplaces run more smoothly

It was almost eight years ago that Sue Jauncey realised corporate culture in Australia needed to change.

A registered psychologist whose career began in the prison system and who later worked for Anderson, leading its human capital division, Jauncey devised the Pulse system in 2008 to transform organisations from a culture of entitlement to a culture of achievement. Hence, Pulse Australasia was born.

“I started the Pulse program, which aims to increase personal accountability, trust, collective achievement, as well as creating an aligned culture within the organisation based on key psychological principles of human behaviour,” she says.

“We do this by establishing key signature behaviours that become ingrained in the company culture, which are led by the CEO and positively acted out by everyone.

“This is then followed by developing accountable business measures, which can be accurately assessed.”

A key method of the Pulse principle is anonymous peer-to-peer evaluation of up to 10 people in your immediate sphere of influence three times a year. “Our programs offer accountability and insights into organisations where the cultural behaviour of every individual can be measured and accounted for to see if they are acting in alignment with your signature behaviours,” Jauncey says.

The company has now expanded into Europe, with an office in Britain.