Who owns employee surveys in organisations? Well.... between me and you I'll give you a clue - the word 'employee' gives it away or does it? After all, if its a customer survey - it's marketing, if it's an IT survey it's IT and if its about finance or accounting - well it's finance. Thus employee surveys it must be HR - right? Well, maybe!
Our market intelligence suggests perhaps it's only 1 in 2 or less in terms of outright ownership. This has puzzled us somewhat so we sent our intrepid investigator 'Sherlock HR-olmes' off to well investigate...........
Sherlock came up with some interesting reasons behind this. He suggests that:
- Some HR functions were renamed from personnel department but responsibility for a survey was never in personnel's remit...
- Marketing were always seen to have the expertise in questionnaire design and research science and thus got given it (despite the fact that they are not specialists in people management)
- Employee surveys were seen as internal comms where internal comms was not under HR's remit
- HR functions are politically savvy and given the 'political nature' of some employee surveys are happy to let somebody else do it
- HR not trusted or seen as having the capability to carry out this type of internal activity since its 'not payroll or recruitment'
- HR functions themselves not seeing employee surveys as core space for them...........
Mmmm...anybody know of an HR function that does the organisations' customer/market surveys (nothing to do with internal HR function customer surveys) instead of marketing? No I thought not......
Even allowing for the connection with some customer-type questions this does not mean that marketing (or a separate internal comms unit) should 'own' employee surveys. In fact if I was in marketing (and I have been) I would be livid if I did not own the market/customer survey.......
But in HR it's ok to shrug your shoulders and go 'well at least we dson't have to resource it' (since we're too busy firefighting). I suggest if HR wants a cause, it need look no further than claiming the employee 'centre ground' in its own organisation (and this is even where ES's are 'jointly' owned). It can still quite happily procure external expertise or involve other functions due to any required input. The latest is that new CSR type functions are now owning it!!!!! HR SHOULD OWN IT.Period. It should ensure that it measures something useful (i.e. engagement) with it as well as implementing any OD type activity on it and do it regularly.
But even where HR has ownership of employee surveys - there are still some searching questions... Why are there so many craply designed surveys (even from external suppliers)? Why are they not carried out religiously like any other audit-type instrument rather than being initiative/whim driven? Why do we insist on improper use of 'employee labelling'?, and why are we still measuring satisfaction?
People in HR regularly bleat on about being strategic - I can't think of anything more centrally strategic than a well-designed and executed survey that evaluates people management and engagement, which is measured properly (i.e. not benchmarked response rate or by single item) and is used as a progressive management tool and reported on regularly across the organisation...............it is not an administrative task it's human capital intelligence.
Do you own yours?
