There are a lot of reasons why you should want your employees to be engaged – amongst them increased productivity, less time off sick, fewer staff leaving, more innovation, better health, oh, and let’s not forget higher turnover.

But just because you want to find out how things stand now so that you can put together a plan to improve your employee engagement, doesn’t mean that everyone agrees with you or will play by the rules. Ultimately if anyone isn’t giving you honest answers, for whatever reason, you’re not going to get an accurate result. 

Here are 4 things to watch out for and what you can do to prevent them.

A sudden change in a line manager’s behaviour

You’ve announced the employee engagement survey is coming up and told everyone what it’s going to cover, or perhaps you run your employee engagement survey at the same time each year. Suddenly a team finds their line manager is attentive, seems to care what they think and is getting things done that they’ve been asking about for the last 11 months.

When that team answer the questions about their line manager will their answers reflect the previous 11 months or the 1 right before when they became the best boss ever?

Chances are, once the survey has closed, that manager is going to drop back into their previous poor performance. 

The fact that they changed their behaviour indicates that a) they know they’re not doing what they should be doing and b) they can do a lot better. 

What can you do?

At the start of the section about line manager perceptions set the scene for your respondents; you want them to think about the last 12 months (or however long it’s been since the last survey if you’re running them more frequently). This will encourage them to think back further than the last few weeks.

Make sure the questions you have about line managers include words like ‘regularly’ and ‘consistent’. These will help nudge thoughts about inconsistent behaviour so you get a more realistic answer.

“Get a 5 to stay alive”

In the lead up to the survey launch date, line managers have a team meeting where they ask, tell or otherwise influence their team to give very positive responses to the questions about themselves. They may indicate that the results don’t matter, that it’s just a piece of company fluff that has to be be done.

The line manager is doing this because they fear what will happen if they get a low score. They don’t like failing, or they’ve seen what happens to others that got low scores, or there’s a company myth, like “get a 5 to stay alive”, that puts pressure on line managers to achieve very high scores.

The team go along with the line manager because they fear the fall-out.

What can you do?

Train your line managers to be good people managers so that they know what’s expected of them and how to deliver it. Training and defining a set of standards starts everyone working for you as a manager off with a solid foundation and eliminates any claims of lack of knowledge when problems occur. Training should be backed by easily available support should any incident arise where line managers aren’t sure how to best deal with it – they have someone to ask. Poor feedback from teams about a line manager’s performance is because of a decision the line manager made not to perform that part of their role to the agreed standards.

Communicate the purpose of the survey extremely clearly, along with how the responses will be used. This should include what will happen if feedback about line managers shows that improvement’s needed – directed at both the team and the line manager. If everyone knows what to expect and that the results will be used to improve weak areas, people are less likely to believe anyone that questions this.
The implications of poor performance shouldn’t be anything to fear for anyone concerned – embarrassment, shame and fear are emotions and feelings that people want to avoid. Ensure that neither the line manager, nor the team, are made to feel this way. 

Add a question about coercion into the survey. Having a question in the survey asking whether the respondent was told to answer any questions in a particular way will highlight any issues without anyone risking being identified as a tattletale. The existence of the question within the survey will act as a deterrent to most people and prevent them from putting pressure on any one.

Stop referring to the results as ‘scores’. Using a 5-point answer scale has meant that the responses can be used to calculate an average ‘score’. This is useful as it shows what areas are over or under performing compared to the average. Once that is done these results are often communicated leading to comparison and feelings of stress, embarrassment, shame and fear for anyone underperforming.
Ultimately you need to establish the standards you want to achieve. Is it that everyone in a team answers ‘agree’ or ‘strongly agree’ to questions? Or that the majority of a team selects ‘strongly agree’? You may chose to discuss the numerical results with a line manager privately but the team report covering what’s going well and what needs improvement only needs priorities.

Examine your company’s culture. Look specifically at what feedback is given – whether it’s honest and constructive, and how feedback is given and received. And what happens when someone under performs; whether that becomes widely known (leading to stress, embarrassment, shame and fear) and what is in place to support the improvement that’s needed.