Often, the best way to find out what people think of something is to ask them. Businesses are advised to get to know customers through surveys and other tools that get at the heart of what they want and do not want.
While surveys are the go-to technique for finding out things about a defined population, they have problems. How many people have had a brief sinking feeling when completing an online purchase and seeing a customer survey pop up? Online surveys promise they will not take much time, but sometimes they do.
When it comes to answering surveys, people want to know, “What’s in it for me?” That is why many retailers and other organizations offer some sort of compensation for answering a survey. Perhaps participants get a discount code or are entered into a prize drawing. People also crave anonymity, particularly if the organization presenting the survey is their employer. How can they be sure their answers will not be traced back to them? To succeed with the employee survey app, you must first build solid trust with employees.
Here Is What Happens in Groups That Lack Trust
Business strategist Christine Comaford points to brain research by scientists at UCLA indicating that the brain has both a “pain network” and a “reward network.” Both are necessary, and both make sense in the right context. Your pain network is piqued when you experience physical or psychological pain, unfair treatment, or negative social comparison. Your reward network comes to life when you feel pleasure, safety, cooperation, and a sense of belonging and being treated fairly.
Groups can evolve so they stimulate the pain network more than they stimulate the reward network, and when this happens there are negative consequences. For one thing, when group leadership asks for feedback, they either will not get it or what they do get will be untruthful. Why answer honestly when your honesty will be punished, right? For another, group and individual vision can become seriously misaligned. Finally, delegation will fail more, because people fear micromanagement and assume that if they do the job they are asked to, it will somehow be “wrong.”
Why Employees Are Skeptical of Employee Surveys
Employees may be skeptical of employee surveys because their work group dynamic depends on activation of group members’ pain network. They may also fear employee surveys because they worry that if they are honest, their words will come back to hurt them. It is essential that any organization that wants to survey members and get meaningful results be built on a foundation of trust.