Employee engagement consultancies ask a lot of questions, but there’s one question none of them really wanted to ask: “Did you tell the truth?”
The issue of how often employees misrepresent their feelings on engagement surveys was such a mystery that an entire issue of the academic journal Industrial and Organizational Psychology was dedicated to it. Even when using an outside firm to do the survey, “employees may still be concerned about openly sharing their views ... on sensitive topics such as manager effectiveness and intention to stay at the company,” wrote two professors in that publication. “Research from other areas of psychology suggests that assurances of data confidentiality may not reduce concerns about data privacy.”
“Here’s the thing for HR managers everywhere,” said Kai Ryssdal, host of the public radio show Marketplace, “we all lie on those surveys.”
“Exactly,” said Freakonomics coauthor Stephen J. Dubner, “we lie on most surveys, but especially [to the question], ‘How happy are you? And I’m the person who pays you and I need you to tell me how happy you are.’”
Peer-reviewed journals, radio shows, and HR leaders could only guess at the severity of the problem: Surely not everyone feels like they need to lie on these surveys, but just as surely not everyone tells the truth.
Now we know the answer. Generally, less than two-thirds of employees both participate in their companies’ surveys and give candid answers, based on BI Worldwide’s research. Often it’s even lower. That’s a warning shot for the executives who commission these surveys and some of the engagement “experts” who field them. They’re losing the trust of their audiences.
The loss of employees’ true opinions begins with the fact that around one in five doesn’t participate in the survey. How many stay on the sidelines varies widely from one company to another. Once in a while, it’s nearly half. In equally rare cases just five or 10% hang back. “Non-response” somewhere between 15 and 30% is the norm.
Reasons for not participating are sometimes as trivial as the employee having been on vacation or being so swamped with work that answering the survey falls through the cracks. However, it’s generally believed that those who don’t answer have, as a 2000 study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology found, “greater intentions to quit, less organizational commitment, and less satisfaction toward their supervisors and their own jobs.” That study also found the “noncompliant” employees (I don’t like that scolding adjective) have “more negative beliefs regarding how their organizations handle employee survey data.”
Realizing we had the advantage of conducting a study not commissioned by the respondents’ employers, my colleagues and I decided to ask the question that, so far as we’re aware, no one had posed to a representative sample of U.S. workers: “Did you answer your company’s survey differently than how you actually felt?” Twenty-one percent said “yes.”
That’s a high proportion, given that most people have trouble both lying and admitting that they have. Asked a direct question, most people’s reflex is to tell the truth. It’s a big deal when one out of five survey-takers says, essentially, “Yes, I lied.” For this reason, that 21% is probably a conservative number.
Subtract one-fifth of employees who don’t take the survey. Subtract one-fifth of those who do because their answers are fictitious. What remains is about two-thirds or less of the company’s population who both took the survey and gave the company their true opinion.
Just as important as the proportions are the reasons why people would feel compelled to answer differently than they actually feel.
Among the 4% of survey-takers who score their jobs lower than they feel, many do so to “send a signal” and make their displeasure clear. One told us he scored his job lower “to see what my boss has to say.” Another said, “The boss I had at the time was and is a two-faced bully who has no idea what the people he is over are able to do.” One woman scored her job harshly because she “felt that I needed to show there were things that needed to be addressed.”
The rest of the fibbers – the 17% of company survey participants who give their jobs artificially high scores – did so out of fear of recriminations, lack of trust, not believing the survey was confidential, or believing it to be an exercise in futility. This is understandable, given how some consultancies besmirch the character of those who don’t answer positively enough.
Employees are catching on. “Many people who I work with said they (the managers) would hold the answers against you, so tell them what they want to hear, not the truth,” one man explained. He was concerned “that the answers would eventually haunt me or be used against me for merit or other incentives.”
“Two years ago, my friend was yelled at for her answers,” said one woman. “Since they lied about the anonymity of the survey, I didn't want to get disciplined or terminated for providing a truthful answer. The last time I tried to be truthful at a meeting, my boss shot me the look of death. They seem to want us to tell them what they want to hear without us saying anything negative or showing them any opportunities to improve policies or procedures.”
“No one will listen” to the results, one woman said.
“I felt really uncomfortable telling the higher-ups, who don't know me or what I do, the real down-and-dirty,” said another woman. “I did not really feel it would hurt me to be 100% honest, but there was that little nagging voice ... Down deep you are always afraid that they will be taken the wrong way and there will be a negative reaction.”
One employee gave more positive answers than his real feelings “because I’ve taken these surveys in the past and nothing ever gets done to address the problem areas. They just get glossed over and ignored.”
One young man simply said, “I wanted to keep my job.”
The built-in irony is that the companies that most need to hear that things need fixing are also those where fear of being blunt runs highest. In those cases, both "non-response" and lying on the survey run higher, giving the company true answers from less than half of its employees. The engine is chewing itself up, but everything on the dashboard says the vehicle is running fine. The irony becomes farce when employees who work for the engagement survey vendors themselves are afraid to tell the truth on their own companies' polls.
No one has reliable figures on whether people were more candid in the early days of employee engagement surveys, but they probably were. Much of the malpractice mentioned above had not yet occurred. Consultancies hadn’t yet tried to stir up more business with inflated claims of a “worldwide employee engagement crisis.” Nor had they honed the art of demonizing poorly managed workers whose only offense was answering truthfully that they were, in fact, poorly managed. More of the burden was on the employee to have evidence why she should not both participate in the survey and give honest answers.
Abuses by employers and consultancies are leaving many employees unwilling to give candid response... [+]
Now the burden is shifting. The reasons why a frustrated employee can’t be brutally honest are in plain view. Any worker can go to the website of his employer’s survey contractor to see how he will be characterized if he says, no, he has not gotten recognition, does not have an attentive manager, can’t see much of a future at the company, and – “Am I really going to get in trouble for this?” – does not have “a best friend at work.”
If executives want the truth from their employees, they are going to have to start considering candid answers acts of loyalty and trust, given because the workers have confidence that something will be done and that it won’t come back to bite them. They’ll need to do more with the results. They’ll need something better than the standard lather-rinse-repeat annual poll. They’ll need to stop paying managers bonuses for high scores. And they’ll need to stop hunting down the truth-tellers for their candor.
Otherwise, they should skip the survey altogether instead of launching a company-wide initiative whose soundtrack is the classic Fleetwood Mac chorus, “Tell me lies. Tell me sweet, little lies.”
