This is Goodhart’s Law.

Probably the most obvious example to us all is in the world of politics.

Ultimately, politicians need to be the most popular to succeed. The intention should be to find the policies that benefit the greatest number of people, and hence win their support. An alternative may be to simply support policies that are popular. And those policies may not actually benefit many people, or be contradictory, or not be practical. I’ll allow the reader to decide if they can identify any examples I the recent behaviour of any of the people that have

We can consider the further impact of politician’s decisions.

In education, there is a desire to make young people ready for the world of work, or further education. That success is most often measured in their grades. So, a lot of schools’ time is spent preparing for exams: rigidly covering the curriculum, showing how to answer questions. Less time is maybe spent on inspiring a passion for subjects, or the other life skills that will allow them to thrive in later life.

Similarly, healthcare. If hospitals are targeted with not keeping people in A&E for more than four hours, is there then an incentive to too quickly discharge or move to less suitable area, rather than consider the best interest of the patient? If ultimately there’s a worse patient outcome, then another – more important – target will be missed.

We see so many example of Goodhart’s Law in every area of life.

The call centre that targets shorter calls. If the advisor has to complete each call within x minutes, you can find yourself, a few seconds short of x minutes, being transferred to someone with no knowledge of the conversation you’ve just had. Awful customer experience; target met.

One of the key metrics for UK supermarkets is market share. When your physical stores can’t deliver you any more share, the best way is to start home delivery. Except, it costs 2-3 more times to pick and deliver the shopping than you charge for it. Market share goes up, but your margin takes a huge hit.

And we’ve all read copy that has clearly been designed for SEO. It’s painful to read, you lose all faith in whoever has published it … but you clicked it, right?

Why am I telling you this? Because it’s what happens with a lot of engagement surveys.

We take engagement surveys because we want our organisation to perform better.

We do this because we know that more engaged employees create better business success.

There’s a huge body of evidence for that, not least: https://engageforsuccess.org/further-evidence/

But where we started off measuring, we often then start to target. And that’s the mistake.

Instead of trying to ensure that the organisation performs better – in terms of profitability, productivity, service, wellbeing etc, with one of the measures towards that being engagement, we end up doing something else.

We turn the measure into a target. And now we’re not focused on better performance. Now we’re trying to improve our engagement score.

That’s less useful in two main ways:

1)      We’re going to end up focusing on individual questions.

Creating engagement survey questions is really hard. Think of all the interactions, processes, policies and behaviours that go into creating your experiences of working for your employer. Think of all of the things that bring you energy and connection, and all of the things that can sap your will and enthusiasm.

A list of questions that covered all of those aspects would be long. 100s of questions, if not an order of magnitude more. (It would in itself be a monumental drain on engagement!)

So, using research, we have to home in on the things that are more likely to have the greater impact. Even then, that’s a long list. So, we need to start to aggregate ideas, and ensure that questions cover more than one idea. In other words, make the questions less precise.

Instead of asking all the questions that would determine if we have a good relationship with our line manager: do they understand your needs and desires, do they support you, do they have your back, do they “get” you etc, we might instead simply ask “Do you have a good relationship with your line manager?”

The trouble with focussing on individual questions

Let’s look at a few of Gallups’s Q12 questions. They’re scientifically rigorous, I have no doubt, let’s think about what we might do with the results of them. These are questions 10-12

·         I have a best friend at work.

·         In the last six months, someone at work has talked to me about my progress.

·         This last year, I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow.

If your engagement scores aren’t as good as you would like, then it would be very tempting to turn the measure into a target, and see how you can specifically bump up these scores.

·         In the last six months, someone at work has talked to me about my progress.

Here’s the most obvious example – and one frequently observed. “The survey is coming out in a fortnight, make sure you’ve talked to your team about their progress”. The question doesn’t measure the quality of that conversation, or whether it actually enables anyone’s progress – just that’s it been a topic.

·         This last year, I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow.

Now here, I might have a bit more sympathy for the employer. I regularly hear within organisations. I don’t get a chance to develop, which often means there’s no immediate vertical promotion on offer. When pressed, it can get a bit “What have the Romans ever done for us?” No development: apart from the training, the mentoring, that project I was selected for, the coaching, the chance to visit the other site, that conference etc etc

So, there will often be internal comms campaigns around all of these opportunities, because people sometimes don’t class them in the same way as their employer, and sometimes that’s unfair.

·         I have a best friend at work.

I’m really not sure what we’re going to do about this. Fair to say it’s the Gallup questions that’s most often questioned.

I would simply reflect that you’re more likely to be friends with people of your own gender, ethnicity and socio-economic background. So, where this takes us in greater diversity is a question mark.

2)      The rigor of a survey can suggest deeper enquiry isn’t needed.

But instead of looking at individual questions, this is what organisations should do instead.

What we’ve shown in the look at questions above is that survey questions talk to the average employee – they have to.

Are all your employees average? Thought not.

Let’s think about that progress question: “In the last six months, someone at work has talked to me about my progress.” A low score there may indicate a problem, but we know that one conversation is not the solution.

And we can’t know the solution from the survey, that’s just not what they are designed to do.

They’re there to highlight areas that are worthy of celebration and exploration, for which you can set internal benchmarks, and track over time. (External benchmarks? Too many variables to be useful IMHO, but that’s another blog)

What we can do is now ask people – with a much more open forum and questioning style – tell me about progress, what it means to you, what’s important and do you get the right opportunities here.

There’s a chance that chances to progress are fine, and that it just happens in a much more organic way in this organisation. A low score doesn’t indicate a problem, it shows the question is less relevant.

There’s a chance too that, perhaps in one section, or at one level of the organisation, “progress” isn’t an especially important concept. It may be that people just want to turn up, do their best work, and go home. Sometimes, it feels as though that’s forgotten as a valid choice, and an environment in which you can have highly engaged people.

Similarly, it might not be about progress, it might be about real mastery and expertise. The opportunities to move on or up may be less relevant, but if anything gets in the way of you honing your skills, becoming better at your current role, that could be a huge engagement dampner.

Or it could be that progression opportunities are seen as fuzzy, inconsistent, or perhaps even unfair. And especially in the latter case, if you are not seen as an employer of fairness and integrity, there’s little chance of getting truly engaged employees.

You need a much deeper level of insight than survey questions

Yes, there’s free text in a survey. But people’s energy for that is often low. They are often trying to get the survey done and out of their inbox, as much as give a full account go their experience.

You need a different environment to allow people to express their views, with the topics guided by (but not limited by) the survey.

It needs to feel like an investment in listening to your people. Taking them out of their day job (WITHOUT the work piling up behind them!) and giving them a safe environment in which they can share their feelings, understand one another and ideally start to suggest and build some solutions.

And, as a side note, if you give your people:

·         a safe space

·         some guardrails around budgets / practicality /feasibility

·         a focus on what we’re trying to get to: profitability, productivity, customer experience etc

You will get viable, useful ideas.

Depth of insight is a valuable investment

I mean, I-would-say-that-wouldn’t-I? But, use of an external expert:

·         demonstrates your investment (and puts the onus on them to prove you’re not just spaffing money on consultants)

·         helps create that safe space – the person that’s listening has no skin in the game, they don’t need to justify anything that’s gone before, they have no vested interest in what happens next. They can listen without baggage.

It’s in these rich conversations that the roots of engagement are found, where you can make the bigger differences. The ones that should show up on your engagement survey, but more importantly the ones that will show up on your bottom line.

I’m almost bored of hearing myself say this, but engagement surveys are often seen as a map, when I think they are a compass. They tell you roughly where to look, the finer, more useful detail is elsewhere. The insight that helps you understand how people feel about their relationship with their work, that puts you in their shoes.