Employees may have seen larger layoffs, reduced bonuses, organization changes, unfulfilled promises, higher pressure on targets, and higher work loads due to special projects or simply due to a smaller workforce. As a result, most likely trust in corporate leadership and perceived fairness may have suffered significantly.

Consequently, companies that have been hit hard by the crisis, may experience a disillusioned and disengaged workforce which naturally performs much worse than before the crisis. This is critical, because as the economy is picking up again, it’s now the time when companies must position themselves to grab newly available market potential quickly.

Consequently, it’s important that corporate leaders keep an eye on their people and take the right measures in order to recover eventual motivation issues. However, addressing people motivation issues can be very complex as we are dealing with emotions and perceptions rather than hard facts. Thus, it’s crucial to really understand employees’ perspective before taking any action.

People Engagement and Satisfaction Surveys can be a good starting point to understand how to improve the morale of employees.

However, if you decide to capture feedback you must get this right. If conducted poorly, the generous exercise may end up in another disappointment for your employees.

Here some ideas how to get most out of an employee survey:

Aim for high participation. To do this the purpose and importance of the survey needs to be communicated well throughout the organization and supported by all management. In some cases it’s also recommended to let some external students capture answers on paper rather than through an online form. Email invitations are too easy to ignore.

Ensure people are not afraid to tell the truth. If people feel that their individual answers will be known by their bosses they may fear the consequences and answer too positive. A typical mistake is to ask too many so called screening questions upfront, e.g. department, length of service, work level, age, gender. Stick to what is important. Put not more than two screening questions and place them at the end of the questionnaire.

Ask the right questions in the right order. You should ask a mix of engagement, satisfaction and change readiness questions. It’s important to distinguish clearly questions about the direct supervisor from questions about overall corporate management. Don’t group questions by topic as you will get dependent answers. Provide a field for general comments at the end.

Mine the data to dig out real insight. Many companies only look at average answers for all questions by department. But usually there is much more insight sitting in the data. Look at motivation drivers rather than outcomes. Have a look how different perceptions are within the same team. Analyze dependencies between answers, e.g. “people who don’t get sufficient recognition from their boss also would recommend their workplace to their friends”. Keep an eye on sample sizes and distributions to ensure you don’t misinterpret the results.

Dig deeper if necessary. Survey results are just data and may simplify the reality too much to derive the right measures. Therefore, for critical areas it may be wise to follow up with some well moderated focus groups. These focus groups would need to be conducted by an external vendor in absence of corporate leadership to get people to voice their real opinion.

Close the loop. Employee surveys raise expectations. Management being willing to listen people also communicates willingness to improve even if changes have to start with the management itself. Hence, ensure that you are ready to accept the feedback and take visible action. However, don’t over-promise. Changing people’s perception may take more time than people are willing to give.

Conduct the survey at least once per year. By doing so you ensure consistent focus and improvement of people related matters. The commitment to measure one year later again also may increase the people’s trust that you are committed to act on any kind of results.

By considering the points above, chances are very high that the right action can be taken to recover eventual motivation issues in the organization. Moreover, leaders should not keep the ‘listening exercise’ to the special activity of a people survey or focus group only. Opening doors to employees to provide honest feedback without fear of negative consequences will help to get timely feedback and will avoid big surprises when receiving the results of the employee survey.