What to do with those employee engagement comments

Black and white banner with the words: We hear you.

I worked with a CEO who made it her job to read every single comment in their employee engagement survey. Why? Because she cared what people had to say. Not via the survey company’s watered-down summary or the HR team’s wordcloud, but by reading the raw unfiltered comments. 

It meant she understood her workforce better than any other leader I’ve worked with. It allowed her to act on issues and back ideas. And it showed her when she needed to have difficult conversations with her leadership team. She’s hands-down the most impressive leader I ever worked with. 

Perhaps as a busy C-Suite exec, you don’t feel it’s your job to read all those comments. Perhaps you don’t feel like you have the time. But what’s more important than understanding what it feels like to work at your company? What’s more important than knowing what’s getting in the way of the team you’ve chosen to deliver on your vision being able to do their best? 

You won’t get that understanding from the survey’s highlights report. It might tell you that people don’t understand the strategy, or that their manager isn’t communicating with them regularly. Both hugely important issues you need to correct. 

But it won’t tell you that the engineers who work outside in the cold all day don’t have hot water to wash their hands when they use the facilities.

Or the reason that a specific team is underperforming is because they report to an overwhelmed, inexperienced micro-manager.

Or that your managers are buying laptops for new team members on their personal credit cards because the average wait time for a laptop for a new employee is five weeks. 

Now, while there’s nothing quite like sitting down and reading those comments, your engagement survey might throw up thousands of comments and that really is a lot to take in. There are tools (like this one) you can use to analyse the comments and show you patterns. 

It might be that you ask one of your team to do this analysis and then brief the exec team (comms teams—this is a golden opportunity to show your worth). But that brief should be detailed using real-life comments to back up the findings. 

And once you’ve really understood what’s happening in your org, you need to thank people for giving you an honest picture and take action. Action as specific as instructing your COO to make sure there’s hot water for your engineers to wash their hands. 

There are not many sentences a leader can say that are more powerful than: I’ve read every single comment in the engagement survey and here’s what I’m going to do with what you’ve told me. 

It’s not just once a year those comments are helpful either. We regularly use engagement survey comments to understand an organisation’s personality so that we can:

  • help an organisation uncover their values

  • create new brand language

  • write tone of voice guidelines

  • design employee comms campaigns 

  • plan an all-hands

  • design an event look and feel 

We always say the engagement survey comments are where the gold lies so make sure you get the most out of this valuable asset. 

Just one word of warning before you dive in. You might want to brace yourself. People do speak up when they have something good to say but you’re definitely going to read comments you don’t like. 

I once sent a CEO home with the task of reading the engagement survey comments over the weekend. When he returned on Monday looking a bit shellshocked, he said: I’m glad you made me do that but you could’ve warned me. 

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