How many times to you fill out a survey each year? 50? 100? 500? Now consider how little thought and intent you put into them. Yup, bad news. When major decisions are made off of the results of these, it is easy to see how we are being directed by a broken compass.
The Evidence For How Surveys Kill Your Culture
Start by going to Google Scholar and searching keywords: “surveys”+”flaws” and you will see hundreds of thousands of peer reviewed results showing how flawed survey data burned results. We took the liberty of saving you the leg work here.
Now consider for a moment the ways that you have personally filled out surveys in the past year. Here’s many of the answers we got when we asked over 200 people how they’ve used online surveys (we asked in person):
- “I click the best options as quickly as possible”
- “Usually just pick random answers”
- “I read the questions but try to get it done as quick as I can”
- “…Just delete them”
- “I get my kid to fill them out for me”
- “My work sends out so many I usually ignore them”
- “The last one they asked me to do was over 50 questions. I started it but never finished”
This is exactly what the “Grimacing Face” and “Flushed Face” emoji’s were made for.
Especially when the results of those surveys are used to make major decisions, measure markets, and more.
The Warning: Surveys Are A Blind Spot For Organizations Of All Shapes & Sizes
We don’t know if it’s better, or worse, that publicly traded companies use them in the same way as small businesses. But they do.
Over 79% of organizations used digital survey tools to collect data on their organizations in 2018, and it’s highly likely that number has only increased in the years since then.
In addition, due to the rise in desire to better understand organizational culture that has been brought on by the pandemic, the impact of these tools is only expanding.
This means that, now more than ever, more organizations are using these tools in order to collect internal data on performance AND external data in order to increase profit. This is going to lead to millions, perhaps even billions of dollars being left on the table.
The Solution
It’s time to innovate in how we measure human interaction.
How people interact with each other, with products, services, entertainment, etc is a valuable data pool that we simply NEED TO CAPTURE BETTER in order to fully serve customers, employees, and pretty much everybody (Insert “Shrugging” emoji here).
At Boost Innovation, our GRW Project has an analog tool that does this.
We are going to have a digital version soon.
Don’t follow the broken compass. Find a better tool because surveys kill culture.
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