What Your Employee Engagement Survey Is Actually Telling You

According to data from Gallup, only about a third of employees are engaged in their jobs and their workplaces. But given how much time and money organizations spend measuring employee engagement each year, you probably already knew that the numbers aren’t good.

What you might not know is why. Stretching across the many factors that are typically reported by disengaged knowledge workers — a lack of work-life balance, too many disparate projects, too little recognition — is a common thread: collaboration.

In our experience, collaborative friction — small issues that add up and make getting work done much harder than it needs to be — is at the root of these symptoms. However, when it comes time for an organization to identify solutions for their waning engagement numbers, somehow “completely overhaul the way we work together” doesn’t make it off the whiteboard.

The good news is that there may be just a piece or two of your collaborative fabric that has come unraveled. The trick is to ask better questions in order to identify your key points of friction, and then focus your post-survey efforts on addressing those issues. Here’s a few we commonly encounter:

If your employees report a lack of work-life balance, upgrade your meetings:

When our calendars are packed with meetings, as so many knowledge workers’ are, getting real work done creeps into evenings and weekends. And when an occasional fix becomes the new normal, that’s when the burnout sets in.

Estimates show that between 35-50 percent of meeting time is wasted, which tells us that many of the meetings clogging up calendars are unnecessary or need to be improved. Start by evaluating standing meetings to see what’s still useful, and what can be either cancelled outright, made shorter or less frequent, or accomplished in another way. (Some meetings really can be emails.)

For the meetings you keep, utilize purpose-based agendas to determine who really needs to attend — smaller is better for effectiveness and engagement — and how much time you truly need. Publish clear recaps to combat FOMO and beat the “I forgot what we decided so let’s meet again” cycle.

If your employees say they don’t feel valued and heard, invest in psychological safety:

According to Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson, psychological safety is "the belief that the context is safe for interpersonal risk-taking — that speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes will be welcomed and valued.” Essentially, it’s what makes us feel a sense of belonging as a member of a team.

Unfortunately, a recent study from McKinsey showed that, while 89 percent of employees believe that psychological safety in the workplace is essential, only 26 percent of leaders foster it. There is no quick fix for building psychological safety. It is continually built and diminished by small day-to-day actions. However, leaders do have the power to affect it immediately.

One of the quickest ways to do so is to encourage leaders to start listening. And by listening, we don’t mean “waiting patiently for your turn to speak.” They should make it a point to give employees their full, undivided attention — phone down, laptop closed — and refrain from jumping in with solutions or advice. When the speaker has finished, the leader should recap what they’ve heard without commentary to demonstrate understanding. Trust us, a little listening goes a long way — with direct reports, colleagues, and fellow leaders.

If your employees are tired of spinning in circles, take a look at decision-making:

There’s nothing like sprinting in one direction and then running straight into a decision-making brick wall. Or just gaining momentum and then being instructed to reverse course. It’s enough to make an otherwise high-performing team throw up their hands in defeat.

To make decisions that stick, make it an organizational norm to systematically frame them up front. This means outlining who will participate in the process, including roles (final decision-maker being an important one), the problem to be solved, and the process by which a decision will be reached. Making this crystal clear up front will avoid a lot of wasted time and confusion on the back end.

Bad meetings, long nights, and changing priorities are often chalked up to “just how work is." But if you want a high-functioning organization, with a highly engaged team at the helm, it’s worth the investment to work smarter.