How to interpret your employee survey results and avoid bias

Your survey results are here…now what? Gone are the days of running a survey and ignoring the data or skipping over the bad bits.

An employee engagement survey gives people a chance to tell you how they feel about working for your organisation and the changes they’d like to see. Employees expect you to take this feedback seriously.

Really effective employee engagement action planning starts with understanding the story your employee survey data is telling you and pulling out the key areas to focus on post survey. No organisation could be expected to tackle every piece of feedback. Instead, People Insight recommend using your staff survey results to identify a couple of areas to work on – the things that matter most to your employees.

In order to identify these, your HR team, managers and leaders must all take responsibility for analysing your employee survey data. Reviewing this kind of honest feedback from employees isn’t easy, and during this process everyone is prone to biases. If left unchecked, these biases can lead to incorrect assumptions being made when interpreting the data and potentially, the wrong course of action being taken.

In this guide, we share the potential assumptions and biases to be aware of when analysing employee survey report results and how you can avoid these.

How to follow up your employee survey results

Once your employee survey has closed, it is important to act swiftly. This shows people that their voice has been listened to and appreciated. For the greatest impact, sharing and acting on your employee  survey results should happen company wide and within individual teams.

Best practice for following up survey results:

1. Action is an ongoing thing. Keep up momentum with regular communication about what’s going on. First share high level survey results with all staff, then invite managers to embed action items into team meetings and 1:1s to share progress, and continue to share progress via newsletters, your intranet or other messaging channels.
2. Make it about your employees. More on this later, but it’s vital that you and your leaders approach your survey results objectively. This helps avoid a ‘leadership vs employees’ mentality which research shows can harm levels of engagement.
3. Be humble. When discussing employee survey results, it is fine for leaders and managers to admit that they don’t have all the answers. Encourage managers to start an open dialogue with their teams about the survey results by including teams in action planning workshops. Above all remind your leaders that while some employee feedback may be hard to hear, your survey is designed to gather honest and helpful feedback that will help you grow.

Learn more about successful survey follow up strategies.

Where to look first in your employee survey results

Your employee engagement survey results are packed with insights to interpret that can improve the employee experience. There will be too many to tackle in one go, so instead prioritise 2-3 action areas. These should be items with a big influence on how employees feel, and ones you can realistically act on. For instance, a line manager might not be able to do much if employees feel they aren’t paid enough. However, they can improve the learning & development opportunities on offer or accommodate flexible working patterns.

Use these areas to narrow down your action items:  

• Overall engagement score: According to People Insight’s PEARL™ model of employee engagement, this score is the average of 5 key indicators which combine to show how engaged people are. Use benchmarks to compare your score to past surveys, external benchmarks and see how this varies between locations, teams or demographics.
• Key Drivers: In your survey, some questions will have more of an impact on your engagement score than others. These are your Key Drivers and you should prioritise them in your action plan. If a question has a low score, or appears in your bottom 5, it is an area that needs urgent action.
• Top 5 and bottom 5: While a useful indicator of engagement, don’t look at these scores in isolation. Questions about pay are very often in the bottom 5! However, if something is in your bottom 5 and lower than benchmark or historical data and it’s a key driver, you know there’s a concern.
• Open text comments: These survey questions are a chance for employees to expand on how they feel. The responses can help you to understand why you’ve achieved certain scores within each theme. Save these for last and use the keyword search to look into the issues you’ve identified, such as your key drivers.

Recommended actions from your employee survey results

Once you have processed and absorbed your employee survey results, it’s time to plan the actions you will take to improve key issue areas.

The following checklist can help you prioritise your post-survey actions. In the scenario below Company X has several areas they could focus on in their employee engagement action plan. For example, two Leadership questions appear in their Key Drivers. Additionally, these questions score poorly against external benchmarks and historical scores showing that Leadership is an area Company X should prioritise in their action plan.

How to interpret employee engagement survey feedback without bias

We live in a world of constantly sent and received information and we are pretty good at interpreting it. Assumptions can come in handy to help us spot hidden patterns in complex events, make good guesses from imperfect data and anticipate events based on past experiences.

However, assumptions can also lead us to make biased decisions or draw false conclusions. When analysing employee survey report results, putting these biases to one side is essential.

Biases and attributional errors 

Two of the most common mental processes that cause bias, are Cognitive Dissonance (CD) and the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE).

CD occurs when what we believe about ourselves doesn’t match the external evidence we are Presented with. This creates mental tension that we try and reduce by reinterpreting the evidence to match our beliefs. In the context of employee survey results, it might look like this:

“I am a very good leader, and good leaders get good engagement scores. The engagement scores for my area are poor, therefore the scores must be inaccurate, or people didn’t understand the questions, or the results weren’t reported properly.”  

FAE, on the other hand, leads us to give ourselves the benefit of the doubt when we encounter challenges, but to blame others when they encounter the same. For instance: 

“I was late for a meeting because something important came up, but you were late for the meeting because you don’t care about your colleagues’ time.” 

Examples of bias when interpreting employee survey results

These biases can be very impactful at work and can cause events to be interpreted very differently by different people.

Imagine this scenario. In an organisation, Tom’s team has a high engagement score while Aisha’s team has a much lower score. Different interpretations could be made by the two managers, with very different implications.

Tom:

• The employee survey results are accurate and reliable.
• I am a great leader and my team respect me. Aisha is a poor leader.
• I’ll communicate the results widely with my team and the division.

Aisha:

• The employee survey report results might not be reliable or accurate.
• Tom gets a lot more resources and support than me and has an easier role.
• I am not going to communicate the results to my team.

Their divisional leader may have a third, more-balanced viewpoint to offer.

Divisional leader:

• Both of my Managers are good leaders with their own strengths.
• Tom’s team has higher scores, but they have declined since last year due to staff cuts. He does a great job.
• Aisha’s team has low scores, but they have increased despite a tough year. She does a great job.
• I am proud of both of my managers. They should work more together to share best practice and help both teams improve.

This example shows that we can’t take for granted the views of others. In addition, we can see that our own perceptions are often clouded by emotion or bias.

Do’s and don’ts for interpreting results to minimise bias

Interpreting employee survey results objectively and without bias is so important that it forms a standard part of People Insight’s action planning training sessions.

Here’s a sample of the advice we give managers and leaders to help them on how to interpret employee engagement survey results for the data.

We recommend that you:

• Try to be aware of the biases that you may have when analysing survey results; maintain an open attitude and a willingness to accept the results for what they are.
• Remember that the results are employee perceptions – they may differ from your intentions.
• Do not seek to undermine the methods, accuracy, or scoring of results.
• Focus equally on understanding the negatives and celebrating the positives!
• Do not take negative scores personally. See them as a guide for development.
• While reviewing with your team, seek to understand why people might feel this way, not “who said what.”

Remaining aware of the biases you might bring to your employee survey results and how you can overcome these is vital in order to get the most from your data. Once you have interpreted your results and agreed the areas to act on, you can move on to the fun part – employee engagement action planning.