# Workplace Surgery: getting honest feedback from employees

- **Episode:** [126](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/126.md) (2024-09-10)
- **Type:** workplace-surgery
- **Tags:** employee-feedback, engagement, honesty, management
- **Time:** 41:50–45:59 (start 2510s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/126?t=2510](https://truthliesandwork.com/126?t=2510)

---

[41:50] Leanne Elliott: Right. I feel, have you been listening at all? Honestly. Right, friend. Okay, employee engagement. First of all, externally led. You need somebody else to come in and assure them on that confidentiality and anonymity. If they don't have that, they're not going to answer honestly. And if they're not answering honestly, that data is pretty much useless. It might be that they are that happy and they, you know, things are positive. Cool. But you need a third party to come in, and you need a third party who knows what they're doing, AKA AKA a psychologist like me. Second, it's all about the tool
[42:28] Al Elliott: The tool
[42:29] Leanne Elliott: The tool, the survey that you're using, it needs to be a predictive— or the, the model sitting behind the survey needs to be a predictive model of employee engagement. What that means is we ask the questions that, that we know drive positive employee engagement and result in positive attitudes and behaviours that are also observable within the business, we can then connect what's— what people are thinking and feeling with how they're performing, and also what you can do to control it. So, it's part of a— it's, it's part of a, a something that you can push and pull and, and, and really get your hands around in terms of knowing, right, if I invest a bit more in relationships, then I'm going to see this uptick in terms of attitudes and this uptick in, in terms of performance. That's That's what a really great survey will enable you to do. Not all questions are created equal. That sounds silly, but there are psychologists and statisticians who will spend their life's work just creating questions and validating these questions to make sure they're measuring exactly what they're meant to measure. This is a science. It's not SurveyMonkey. It's a science. So you need to be sure what that, that model of engagement is behind it. And finally, follow it up. You know, you still might not get the most, um, well, you don't know how honest they're going to be unless you, unless you follow up. If a survey— survey is quantitative data, right? It's numbers. We're only going to have percentages essentially of how people feel. Follow up with some listening events, with some focus groups, with, um, yeah, you know, this is, this is a, this is a result that we had. So let's, for example, 70% of people said we put profit over people. Does this represent what you think as a group? Who agrees with this? Who doesn't? Why is that? What have you seen that makes you think and believe that within the organisation? Because there's going to be your truth as the business owner, there's going to be their truth as the employee, and then there's going to be the actual truth somewhere in the middle. So you're going to have to dig into it. Um, it's really cool that you want to dig deeper and not just kind of hear what what maybe they, they want you to hear. Um, but I think this is the thing, it's like anything, you know, how do I, how do I save more tax? So I've filled out all the questionnaires online, but I still can't figure out how to do it. No, of course not. You engage a tax specialist. It's a specialist thing. It's human behavior. If you really want to dig into it, engage a specialist with the proper tools, the proper questions, the proper survey, and the proper Totally, totally agree
[45:06] Al Elliott: Obviously, we have our own survey called the RX7, which you can get in touch with. This isn't about selling that, uh, but if you are interested, then, uh, links from the show notes, which is developed by a psychologist who's sitting opposite me there. Um, but there's— that's— I think what Leanne says is key. A lot of business owners think, and myself included before we started doing all this, um, would be, oh, we'll just get a Google, Google Form, write a few questions like, are you happy? What would you change? And then, oh, you, you're doing a survey. You're not. As Leanne points out, human behavior— dealing with humans is one of the most complex and possibly the most complex thing you can do. There are engineers who are— who can build airplanes who probably still don't fully understand how humans work. So this is not something you can do yourself. Yes, of course you can change your own oil in your car. Yes, of course you can change your own brakes on your car. But should you? Probably not. Okay, Lee, I think that's the end. Anything you got to add before we go? No, I think that's we it. say goodbye?