A quick round up of what we’ve been seeing in recent months when it comes to employee surveys, and how we predict that will pan out during the year.
The return of the 360 feedback survey
The 360 Degree Feedback Survey first surfaced during the 1940’s as a way of assessing soldiers’ performance, and made its way into the business world during the 1950s, although it took until the latter end of the last century to become popular. In the last few decades they have been replaced by manager to direct report performance reviews. With people now working across teams, and with less peer communication due to remote working, we are seeing a resurgence in the use of 360 surveys, particularly for leadership teams, as organisations seek to mature and develop their teams.
Exit surveys
Another fast-growing use case, this time fuelled by recent legislation changes. With the onus now on companies to pro-actively address discrimination, bullying and harassment, exit surveys are a crucial check point. It has become much more important for them to have a handle on behaviours that people are experiencing in the organisaion. With the greater convenience of an exit survey over an interview and a higher prevalence of candid answers, this is helping to identify issues that are causing employees to leave the organisation and to localise those issues so that they can be quickly resolved.
Travel surveys
This may seem like an odd one, but for many sectors, emissions reporting is now expected, and in many cases, it is mandatory. This is hard to do unless you have a firm grasp on how your workforce is moving around. Even then, calculating emissions for different distances, forms of transport, working patterns etc soon becomes a headache. Whilst there are some dedicated tools out there for this, they are inflexible and can be expensive when budgets are tight, or when you only need to do this reporting every few years. We’re finding more and more customers breathing a sigh of relief when they discover they are able to do this with the tool they are already using for many other employee surveys.
Reducing workforce
Hot in the wrong sense, but a difficult reality in many sectors in 2024, and into 2025. Many organisations are experiencing hiring freezes or ‘reductions in force’. The outworking of this is that employees are being asked to do more and more with less, which eventually results in a disgruntled workforce and employee burnout, however loyal they are. A ‘managed reduction’ is a more difficult but considered strategy, finding ways to meet the needs particularly of the top performers and key individuals who will be essential to the organisation when it begins to turn around, and identying skills gaps and opportunities with in the organisation. Without this, high performing employees will be the first to move on to organisations where they feel better understood and able to flourish.
Accessibility in surveys
This is mandated by legislation, and an obvious reasonable adjustment for an organisation to make for anyone in the organistion with a disability. While this has been common in the public sector for many years, the commercial sector is only just catching up. The new interest is coming from an increased understanding that attention to accessibility improves the experience for everyone (sometimes quite drastically!), which has an immediate return on investment in higher response rates and better quality data.
Use of AI in analysis
Although this was a major topic in 2024, awareness of AI in data analysis has been on the rise for a number of years, but understanding of its strengths and weaknesses has lagged behind. This is starting to change as organisations come to terms with the difference between generative AI, and other forms of AI, which are less likely to misrepresent or misreport and distort the responses in the way that LLMs can. There is a gradually increasing understanding of both the environmental impact of relying on generative AI, with the intensive server and energy usage that it creates, and also the data security and privacy implications of data being exported to third party countries with looser data protection rules, and being used in training new models, which in turn expose this confidential data.
DEI being less hot has become hot
According to many reports in the media, and what we hearing in leadership discussions, organisations are rolling back on their diversity initiatives. There are a number of different drivers, from financial restraints, to data showing that initiatives so far have reduced diversity rather than increasing it. While we are not seeing this with the organisations we work with, it is changing the context for these initiatives. It is not yet clear what the impact will be, but the narrative has certainly changed.
Have you noticed anything we’ve missed? We’re interested to hear what you foresee on the horizon.