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 Hiii y’all!! My spirits are flying high this AM. I spent the weekend at a friend's lake house and being outdoors defffff has an impact on my mental health. It’s like we’re not meant to be behind a computer screen, or really in front of any screen 24/7!! Anyhoo, I came into this week READY TO GOOO! This week is stacked too, I’m in Chicago for a dinner. If you’re around hit me up and maybe we can grab a coffee? I also have: 🎧 S13 of the pod dropping fresh eps every week. This week on the mic is Stephanie Lemek and we’re talking about how HR of the future must be more trauma informed. But that doesn’t mean we play therapist… because we’re not qualified to do that! 📺 This month’s HR Therapy!! Everyone is talking about AI but I want to go one step further and actually figure out HOW it’s impacting our workforces. So I grabbed some experts in transformation and we’re talking about what some companies are doing & learning from this time and how you can be better prepared to handle the changes in your workforce. Now, onto today! This quarter we’re in builder mode so every week we’re either improving things or tearing them down. And on today’s list is engagement surveys. Sponsored by Teamtailor Fun fact: the LA28 Olympics organizers hired their CEO FOUR YEARS before opening night! 😲 Teamtailor's latest article breaks down why coordination failures often stem from hiring issues that happened 12-24 months ago that nobody noticed until now. The Atlanta '96 Olympics learned this the hard way, with athletes showing up late to their own events and journalists asking strangers for directions on live TV!!! 😬 Builder Mode Why are we doing this? Okay tell me if the following describes your organization. Once a year (twice if you're fancy), you send out a survey. You then chase employees down to fill it out, sending out a few reminders and even chase down managers to ask them to remind their teams to fill it out. Three weeks later you get a report with a bunch of numbers and a heatmap. Leadership nods at the heatmap in a meeting and asks a few follow up questions (if you’re lucky). Then everyone goes back to exactly what they were doing before. How close did I get to your reality?? Here's the thing that gets me a tiny bit heated: most companies run one survey a year (two if they're feeling ambitious), then act shocked (SHOCKED!!!!) when they can't get ahead of disengagement before it costs them. So why do we keep defaulting to the once-a-year event anyway? A few potential reasons:
All three are real but none of them are the actual reason we should keep doing it this way… 📣 The annual engagement survey isn't broken because the questions are bad, it's broken because it's structurally incapable of catching anything in real time. By the time you see the dip, the person who was unhappy already left, or worse is quietly dragging down the team with them. So here's my Q3 verdict, and yes, I know some of you are going to email me about this: 🏗️ Rebuild it. Don't improve it. What if we replaced the whole annual engagement model... ❌ OUT: the annual survey with nothing else 👂IN: better, and more continuous, listening practices Here’s how you’re going to do that! What a rebuild actually looks like: A rebuild is not "buy a pulse survey add-on" because congrats, now you have two rituals nobody trusts instead of one!! This isn't a tooling problem, most of you already have access to what you need... It's a practice problem!! It’s time to actually restructure how you listen at your organization:
None of these are novel ideas individually… The point is you stop treating "engagement" as an annual event or just a survey with a report attached, and start treating it as something you're monitoring the way you'd monitor anything else that matters to the business: ✨ Continuously with context ✨ Is this more work than sending one survey a year? Yes. Is it more useful than a heatmap nobody acts on? Also yes. Okay but I know how this goes, you're nodding along, you agree with me in theory, but now what?? I believe (and this may sound weird) to listen better you need to ask better questions. ✍️ When it comes to pulse surveys, 1:1, and stay interviews here are questions your team can leverage:
Okay, those questions are helpful but there's a caveat... There's more!! If you're worried this sounds like "just talk to your people more," you're not wrong, and that's kind of the point... The annual survey somewhat became a proxy for paying attention. But paying attention to your employees means doing it more than 1-2 times a year. Because it's not working in its current state... hence the rebuild!! Here's the part you cannot skip: having the questions is NOT the same as having a strategy. If you don't go back and actually update your strategy docs this whole newsletter will be for not. And don't let me be for not! ✍️ Your homework:
The questions I shared above are honestly the easy part. The follow-through is the whole dang shebang. Okayyyy. That's the verdict, engagement surveys are a rebuild! Next week, I'm on to another thing in HR to improve, rebuild or tear down. Have a topic you want me to tackle next? You know what to do, reply! (HUMAN) RESOURCES
*This one is brought to you by one of my amazing brand partners WORK-LIFE BALANCE
SONG OF THE WEEK 🎧 Rain Check, Lawrence feat Quinn XCII This album art is SENDING ME. Yes, this is legit the single cover!!! Two of my faves together, you know I was sat for this! I hope you enjoyed this, please let me know what you think and what other topics you'd love for me to cover. I'm allll ears. Reminder: Take care of yourself and know that I support you. | |||||||||||
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