By Jeffrey Jolton, Ph.D., Kenexa

Over the last 15 years, employee surveys have transitioned from a human resource activity that evaluates satisfaction and program effectiveness to a critical strategic tool that ensures decisions and actions support key objectives and promote organizational performance. This transition has manifested significantly in organizations that employ engagement surveys. These surveys focus on understanding what elements in the work environment (through leadership behaviors, business practices and day-to-day experience) create engaged workers—the individuals who are committed to the goals of the organization and display energy toward achieving its goals.

This shift in direction provided critical insight into the way employee perceptions and behaviors influence business outcomes. Prior to this transition, satisfaction measures were not effective in driving strategy and were not reliably linked to business performance. Now surveys provide a greater focus on how the business process and operations—not just employee opinions—affect the way people act and support the organization. Consequently, linkage between survey measures and business outcomes is more prevalent. Furthermore, leadership can use the information gleaned from these surveys to drive change and gain insight into which survey elements are more critical to influencing desired performance outcomes.

Recently, the survey evolution has expanded its focus from engagement and commitment to building high performance culture. The early work in this area focused on the service-profit chain (employee perceptions influence customer satisfaction, which influences profitability), but now has begun to look more at other high performance indicators unique to an organization’s charter. For example, for a pharmaceutical company, there might be a need to understand how high performance drives innovation.

For a technology firm, the focus may be on the ability to adapt quickly to change. In short, it isn’t always about engagement, and it isn’t always about the employees’ personal experiences. It’s also about the way those experiences drive company performance. 

Another more recent expansion on the survey practice is shifting focus from survey administration and content to creating change and action based on the survey results. More organizations are becoming serious about action planning, and are looking for tools, practices and research that help drive change. Some put more focus on accountability to get action plans accomplished (usually through action tracking tools), while others provide leadership coaching and guidance. (The perception that all managers know how to create effective action plans is a myth.) Research tends to focus on the quality of actions taken and identification of plans proven most effective for a given organization (i.e., action planning as organizational learning). All this helps ensure that organizations can maximize the return on their survey investments.

Related to this practice is an increase in general research and insight analyses expected out of the survey program. In the past, most of the focus was on the results themselves. However, leaders now look for more benchmark comparisons to help gauge their standing in the competition for talent. More is being done to statistically link results to outcomes and to better understand differences in employee experiences (e.g., segmentation analyses that show how high performers are engaged differently than low performers). 

Organizations also are seeking additional opportunities to gather information throughout the employee lifecycle. This includes a growing interest in onboarding surveys, anniversary surveys (e.g., surveying employees at six months and one year), and exit surveys, as well as leadership assessments (e.g., 360 degree feedback and upward feedback surveys). The information gathered through the survey process can be immensely valuable in understanding the organizational processes and guiding improvement.

Emerging Trends 
Engagement, as a central focus of organizational surveys, has been in full swing for more than 10 years. However, as organizations become better at creating engaged environments and driving high performance, the need to look at a “next step” is shaping the next generation of survey work.

Three key (interrelated) themes appear to be emerging: 
• Defining the employment brand 
• Creating the employee experience 
• Leading strategy and employee confidence

Defining the Employment Brand Organizational values have had a renaissance effect on how companies view and focus in on living their values. Organizations are realizing creating an internal (employee) brand that helps attract the right individuals to the organization and retain talented employees is just as important as the investment they have made in building an external (customer) brand identity. Furthermore, there is a need to ensure the two brands complement one another. One of the biggest threatsto a company’s external branding efforts is a counter internal employee experience (because employees don’t know how or can’t support it). To avoid this, employment branding is being reflected in more organizational surveys. 

The process of measuring and defining an employment brand often has been conducted separately from external brand efforts, but as companies try to minimize survey fatigue and costs, the opportunity to merge the two purposes is increasing. Branding requires a fair degree of footwork, interviewing executives and key stakeholders about what the brand represents, examining how the customer brand intersects with the employment brand and measuring the existing culture’s strengths and stakeholder desires. All these components are braided together to shape and define the employment brand. The last cultural measuring component is a culture survey, such as Kenexa’s Cultural Indicator (KCI).

The KCI is not designed to explain what influences the business outcomes of weak processes. Rather, it defines the underlying values and philosophy that make an organization what it is. In other words, engagement surveys (and other organizational assessments) explain what is going on in the organization, so it can be managed or changed, and KCI explains why the organization acts the way it does. For example, an engagement survey might tell you that your focus should be on encouraging people to share ideas, and the KCI would tell you that you are anti-revolutionary, preferring structure and predictability, which has the consequence of stifling innovation. 

The insights from the KCI help shape the brand and help people realize how an organization can best reflect and live its own values. For example, these insights might help you determine that being innovative is not who you are as a company or what you want to focus on, or that innovation will be more effective when carried out through established structures and processes that don’t threaten the organization’s identity. Because of this complementary quality of the cultural survey, some Kenexa clients have started embedding elements of the survey into their engagement surveys. This allows them to get both perspectives (the what and why) at the same time.

Creating the Employee Experience 
Using the company’s values to better define what the employee experience should be is different from branding, which, as mentioned, is focused on directing the culture. Employee experience emphasizes the culture and values that show up in what managers and employees do each day. 

This approach through employee experience makes the survey more narrowly focused. Rather than broadly examining all the various components that drive engagement and high performance, experience surveys limit themselves to reflecting specific behaviors and processes that should be seen as definitive or unique to the organization. As a result, the content of these surveys is more customized (often built off of branding and values work), and is less reliant on external norms.

In the previous example, the organization values innovation, but it wants to go one step further and use the survey to measure (and communicate) the manner in which it wants innovation to be promoted. Instead of just asking if one is encouraged to come up with new ideas, the experience survey might dictate that at Company X, every meeting should have five minutes of free association of ideas and that managers should rate individuals on innovation. The survey content then includes measures such as, “We conduct an idea dialogue in every weekly team meeting,” and “Part of my performance feedback includes a discussion on my contribution of new ideas and direction to the team.” 

Dimensions in experience surveys are specifically reflective of the value being examined or a desired experience. Instead of more traditional dimensions, such as “Leadership” and “Quality,” the experience survey might group items into dimensions such as “Drive for Excellence” and “Courage to Act.”

Action taken from these surveys is designed to help create a consistency in the employee experience (regardless of where employees work in the organization). In turn, this helps strengthen a unified brand and value proposition throughout the organization. Because the value proposition is presumed to drive organization performance, the organization can use results to assess how true this assumption is. Results can be linked to show that those groups in the organization who are living the values (creating the desired experience) also are producing the desired outcomes. In a way, the measure is validating leaders’ perception of how an organization’s culture and values are contributing to its long-term success.

Leading the Strategy and Employee Confidence
Whereas other surveys reflect where you are and where you want to go, another emerging area is using survey science and employee perceptions to help leadership test and shape its strategy (usually, strategy shapes the survey and desired actions). 

Pulse surveys, which are being used more frequently by organizations to assess hot button issues, are a simple form of this approach. Typically results from pulse surveys (most often quarterly, but in some cases monthly) are reported in a scorecard or dashboard, along with other business performance metrics. As a result, the information is being used like financial data or other performance data to help leaders shape their policies or strategic decisions.

Using Employee Confidence as an early indicator of a need for change in strategy is a more innovative element. The expectation is that the collective experience and thinking of the group will serve as a monitor for recognizing challenges in the organization.

According to Jeffrey Saltzman, who has pioneered this area, Employee Confidence is made up of two components, each with an internal and external component.
• The first component, organizational confidence, first deals with the quality of the management team and the business processes and overall perceptions of the future of the organization (internal). Second, this component focuses on the attractiveness of the current product mix to customers, the competitive positioning of the company and the future of the industry in which that organization operates (external).
• The second component, personal confidence, deals with the employee’s perception of his/her future and how his/her employer helps prepare him/her for it (internal). Externally, personal confidence also measures the employee’s skill set and the demand for that particular skill set with the job market, such as how easy it would be to find a comparable job if they left the organization.

The internal and external components are measured by attitudinal data, but they are supplemented with a combination of nongovernment organization (NGO) derived hard measures, as well as tracking information on a Kenexa basket of companies. The Kenexa basket tracks the volume of employee testing and the flux in the number of job postings to derive an increase or decrease in the demand for labor. The supplemental NGO statistics include measures such as export growth, foreign direct investment, year-over-year unemployment statistics and changes in Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The employee survey component asks questions that align to these other elements (e.g., my company is well-managed and gets work done efficiently; my company offers desirable products or services to customers; if I left my current job, similar jobs that fully utilized my skills would be available).

Using the collective experience and thinking of the employees across these elements, one can use employee confidence measures to predict how healthy the organization is in the general environment. For example, if internal confidence is high, but there are concerns about the external environment, employees believe the company is well positioned to weather the storm. They are likely to stay and follow the strategy and direction laid out by company leaders. However, if the opposite is true, and confidence is low in the organization and high in the general market, then employees are more likely to see this as an opportunity to leave (and a signal to leaders that their strategy might not be on track).

Measures of employee confidence are being collected at the country level, allowing organizations to measure themselves against emerging trends. It goes beyond the linkage of survey data to organizational metrics, and extends it to measures of economic and market conditions, providing a new level of insight for leadership strategy and guidance.

Conclusion
In addition to the three themes discussed here, employee surveys tend to evolve in other ways. Technology continues to improve, providing new, faster and better ways to prepare for survey administration, report results and explore data. Content and purpose behind the survey will continue to change as organizations learn different ways to optimize surveys for their own needs. 

The common element of the emerging trends is that programs are moving into strategic support and branching out further from being a human resource tool to being a leadership and management information source. However, basic truths always will remain a part of the program, no matter what shape it takes. The quality of the program depends on how well results are communicated to, involved with and followed through with employees. When employees see the value of the program, the value of the information they provide increases.

About the Author

Jeffrey A. Jolton, Ph.D., is the director of global services at Kenexa, overseeing project management and thought leadership for many of Kenexa’s largest global survey projects. Dr. Jolton has more than 15 years of extensive consulting experience, which has made him a leading expert in assessment-based organizational change. He has applied his innovative and insightful guidance to a number of global businesses, including Accenture, CVS, Ernst & Young, HSBC, Johnson Controls and PricewaterhouseCoopers. 

Dr. Jolton is a regular presenter at numerous professional conferences and has more than 25 articles published in professional and scientific journals. Recent topics of his works include understanding dysfunctional organizations, global truths about employee engagement, the role of critical thinking in strategic planning and behavior change across the global spectrum. He holds a Doctorate and a Master of Science degree in Industrial and Organizational Psychology from Ohio University.