Employee Surveys: Why do MDs and CEOs Hate Them?

Employee engagement surveys are often hated by CEOs and MDs, who sometimes think they already can guess the conclusions.  But they can be used to boost team productivity.

So says Mike Turner, the Managing Director of You Become, a leader in employee engagement, organisational culture.

“There’s a tendency to view them as little more than a box-ticking exercise,” he says, adding that they contain strategic information for the C-suite.

“If you do an effective survey, it will become an invaluable metric for you as a Managing Director or CEO to really understand exactly where your business is,” he says in his latest video.

“It will help you to define the strength of your leadership team,” Turner adds. You can look at every significant leader within your organisation and gain insight into how each one performs.

“That is really, really important because you might have a gut feeling, a sign that a particular part of your business is not performing as it needs to be. A well-run survey will expose that, and it’s not that you’re looking necessarily to put someone under pressure, but it might be that an individual within that particular area of your business desperately needs support or a bit of training.”

By providing the support or training, the performance of that leader and his or her team’s productivity should rise significantly, he says. That applies however your organisation defines productivity—in terms of revenue/sales, customer numbers, profits, comparisons and benchmarking, employee costs, physical outputs, or time/speed taken per task or transaction.

“There’s a proven link between employee engagement and productivity,” Turner says. “If you have an engaged team then you have high productivity.” A disengaged workforce, however, will result in low productivity.

Countless studies have illustrated the link between financial success and high employee engagement. For example, Hewitt Research found that companies with double-digit growth have employee engagement percentages of about 63% which is 20% greater than companies achieving single-digit growth. A global workforce study by Towers Watson found that high engagement companies had a 27.4% average operating margin while low engagement companies had an average operating margin of 9.9%.

If you need help or would like to discuss any issue that this video series raises, please call a member of our team on 01932 888489. You Become is a leading expert in employee engagement and organisational for ambitious UK companies.