Here’s Why Managers Should Actually Feel Grateful For Low Scores On Employee Surveys
As we know from a recent report on the state of employee engagement surveys, 78% of companies are failing to generate significant benefits from their surveys. Ideally, a company will see high scores remain high or low scores improve markedly. But for too many organizations, the data from their surveys are ignored, denied or dismissed, especially when the scores are low.
Ironically, low scores on an employee survey can be a tremendous gift for managers and executives. And here's why: First, it's much easier to fix employee anger than employee apathy. When employees give low scores on a survey, they're de facto telling leaders that they still care enough about the company to try to make changes. When employee participation is below 60% on a survey, it's clear that a large swath of the workforce has given up even trying to improve the environment, and that's incredibly difficult to correct. But when employees are actively completing surveys, even though they're giving low scores, they're still engaged with the process.
Second, when a manager gets low scores on a survey, it means that employees have sufficient trust in that leader to appropriately handle the feedback. If employees didn't trust their leader at least a little, if they felt that the boss was truly a vindictive monster, they wouldn't risk completing the survey. Any leader who is open and receptive to feedback, even when it's negative, will be viewed by their employees as trustworthy, approachable and responsive. That, in turn, is only going to build deeper trust and ultimately improve employee engagement.
Now, even though low scores can ironically be a positive sign, it is critical for leaders to react appropriately to that feedback. Managers need to approach their survey results with a growth mindset and to see low scores as an opportunity to learn and improve rather than as a reason for defensiveness.
In simple terms, a growth mindset is a belief that one's abilities and intelligence can be developed and improved through effort and learning. It's the opposite of a fixed mindset, in which people believe that one's abilities and intelligence are fixed and cannot be changed. In practice, someone with a growth mindset embraces challenges and sees failure as an opportunity to learn and grow, while a person with a fixed mindset tends to avoid challenges and is discouraged by failure. When a leader with a growth mindset finds that their employees are dissatisfied with various aspects of the work environment, they'll be open to learning and making improvements rather than getting defensive or denying the results.
It's also a good idea to take a comprehensive approach to survey results, identifying patterns and trends instead of fixating on individual scores or complaints. One of the worst reactions a manager can have to low survey scores is to wonder (or start hunting for) who gave them those low scores; that's the fastest way to destroy trust. But when a manager sees low scores, looks for larger trends, and then seeks additional input from their people to gain a deeper understanding of the problems, trust (and engagement) tends to skyrocket.
One of the additional benefits of approaching negative survey results with a growth mindset is that a manager is going to be far more able to recognize the context of the feedback, such as the current state of the company, layoffs, production crunches, seasonality, and more. While those factors shouldn't be used as excuses for low scores, they can offer insight into the factors driving low (or even high) scores.
Ultimately, a manager should be grateful when they receive low scores from employees because that feedback provides valuable insights into areas where the company or department can improve. Remember that employees trusted leaders enough to even offer that feedback in the first place. While low scores indicate that there are probably underlying issues that need to be addressed, the manager who doesn't receive that feedback can never improve.
