If you're a leader or an HR professional, you know the feeling. You run your annual employee survey, get the results back, and everyone rushes to see the big engagement score. It’s the metric that gets all the attention. But here's the honest truth: a high engagement score, while great, is not a strategy.
It's a lot like having a car with a full tank of gas. That’s fantastic—you have fuel to go somewhere. But if you have no roadmap and no destination, a full tank won't help you get where you need to be.
The point is, employee engagement is a positive outcome, but it's just one piece of a larger picture. The goal is to build a high-performing organization that achieves its mission. And that requires a truly strategic survey.
Consider the classic Van Halen story: Their contract famously included a clause demanding a bowl of M&Ms with all the brown ones removed. A bizarre demand, right? Not at all. It was a strategic indicator.
The band used that request to assess whether the venue's crew had read the contract carefully. If they found brown M&Ms, they knew the crew was sloppy and had likely missed other, more critical technical and safety requirements. The brown M&Ms weren't the goal; they were the strategic metric that signaled whether the rest of the plan was being executed.
Your employee survey can and should do the same thing. A strategic survey doesn't just measure a generic engagement score. It’s designed to answer the specific questions that impact your business, the questions as unique to your organization as the "brown M&M" question.
[Watch now: Why Engagement Surveys Don't Go Far Enough]
If you're a leader, your survey shouldn’t just be a compliance exercise. It should be a tool that enables you to make better decisions.
It Measures What Matters: Are you focused on innovation? Customer service? Efficiency? Your survey should ask questions that give you direct, ground-level insights into the specific areas that are strategically important to your organization. It’s about measuring what your goals are, not just what’s on a generic survey template.
It Directs Employee Energy: When your employees see questions tied to your company's mission, they gain a clearer understanding of how their work contributes to the bigger picture. This aligns their energy and engagement with your core business strategy, turning a positive feeling into real, focused action.
For those of us in the trenches of employee surveys, a strategic approach changes everything.
You Become a Strategic Advisor: Instead of just managing a survey process, you become a partner in helping the business solve its most pressing problems. This elevates your role and your impact within the organization.
You Find Differentiating Insights: While a generic engagement survey will give you data that looks a lot like your competitors', a strategic survey uncovers insights unique to your company. This gives you a true competitive advantage.
A strategic survey doesn't ignore engagement, but it doesn't focus solely on it either. It asks the right questions to understand what's really happening and getting the insights you need to make smarter, faster decisions.
Get started by downloading your Workbook on Evaluating Your Organization – The Strategic Employee Experience
You can also learn more about OrgVitality's Approach to Employee Surveys.