Barely 20% of Finnish organizations conduct an inclusive employee survey process

“Impressive employee experience” was one of the focuses at Professio’s event, Strategy Talk HR 2024. This often means including employees in co-creating their work and work experience, and one tool to work with the employee experience is a modern employee survey. To learn how Finnish organizations use their employee surveys today, Johannes Midtbö, CEO of Populum, asked the Finnish audience live whether their organizations give employees access to the survey results. The answer was surprisingly low – barely 20%. Here, we explain why this is an issue and suggest what to do instead.

The challenges

The objective of an employee survey is to assess the employee experience and identify areas for improvement. The traditional survey approach collects information from employees so that HR, senior leaders, and managers can learn the outcome. Employees usually do not know what happens with the answers they provide. This method brings many challenges, including a lack of trust, lower engagement, a perceived barrier to leaders and managers, lower morale, missed opportunities to make lasting improvements, and a lack of an ongoing constructive dialogue.

The inclusive and open process

Modern organizations today use a continuous listening approach—as opposed to only (bi-)yearly surveys—where employees are included in the process. This influences several positive outcomes, primarily:

1. Increased transparency builds trust: Open communication fosters trust and confidence in the process and management.
2. Stronger engagement and motivation: Knowing that their voices matter, employees are more likely to contribute to improving and engaging in their work. When employees see that their suggestions are taken seriously, they are more motivated to continue to contribute.
3. Higher-quality work, creativity, and innovation: When employees feel included and have a sense of relatedness, positive emotions can override negative stimuli and lead employees to perform at a higher level.
4. Better problem-solving: When employees are asked to provide recommendations for improving a measurement area in an open employee survey process, you get stronger and more constructive solution ideas.
5. Continuous improvements: A transparent employee survey process makes employees more likely to adopt a continuous improvement mindset, as they know the measurement results, what they need to do to improve, and what the survey will ask.
6. Strategy alignment: When you measure regularly, you place focus on the areas that matter most for the organization’s success. A regular, open process creates ongoing transparent communication around the organization’s strategic objectives.
7. Ownership and accountability of change: When you include employees and ask for their feedback regularly, they are more likely to live the new way since they were part of creating it.

There might be several reasons why an organization does not run an inclusive employee survey process. It is often due to a lack of the right technology, discomfort with allowing employees to see the results and survey comments, or a top-down culture.

With the right technology and a bit of courage, the discomfort of sharing the measurement results usually goes away after the first one or two surveys. The employee-leader gap narrows, and a more authentic conversation starts and focuses on continuous improvements.

A top-down culture is outdated and something talent shies away from, which should be reason enough to change to an open employee survey process. When you do, you open up the possibility of co-creating an impressive employee experience.