Your Help Requested: The Only HR Technology Survey that Matters

You know I don't ask much from you, gentle readers? 

Right?

I grind away over here in the sub-basement cranking out posts asking really nothing from you the readers. Day-in day-out, week-in week-out, and really only with the hope that if I could impact just one little kid out there, who may have been thinking about dropping out of school, but found the blog and decided to stick to his studies with the dreams of a great future in Human Resources or Technology that it would have all been worth it... 

I kid, I kid, (kind of).

Seriously, today I am asking for a bit of a favor from those of you that are HR practitioners, and are at all interested, impacted by, and involved with workplace technology. That is, essentially, all of you.

Each year HR Technology industry legend Lexy Martin and her colleagues at CedarCrestone sponsor the most important survey of Human Resources Technology, titled the CedarCrestone 2012–2013 HR Systems Survey: HR Technologies, Service Delivery Choices, and Metrics, 15th Annual Edition. That's right, now celebrating it's 15th year of tracking the adoption, deployment approaches, and value realized from Human Resources Technologies by organizations of all sizes.

My favor is to ask you to take 15-20 minutes out of your Friday, or your weekend, and take the survey.

If you want to learn more about the survey itself, you can check out the introduction letter from Lexy, which nicely (includes a strong pull quote from the most interesting man in HR, Bill Kutik). If you are already sold on the value of this annual survey to the greater HR and HR Technology community, (and you should be), you can launch the survey here. 

It will take 15, 20 minutes of your time, max. And in addition to having my enduring appreciation, and the good feeling that by sharing your experience and insight to this survey you are contributing to our increased industry understanding, you'll also be eligible to win some really cool prizes, (like $100 Visa gift cards).

Look the chance to win a prize for participating in the survey is cool, but for real, you should really want to take part because it truly is the most important HR Technology study that I know of, and the only one that I would be willing to make an (extremely rare), ask of my blog readers.

So here is what you need to know one more time:

HR Systems Survey backround and welcome letter - here

Take the survey and be a good HR citizen - here

Survey responses will be accepted until July 2, 2012.

Thanks so much for the indulgence, and now I will return to the basement to get cracking on next week's content.

Have a great weekend - and many thanks! 

The One-Question Survey

Chances are if you work in a corporate job, in the last year you've taken some kind of engagement or employee satisfaction survey (or perhaps created and administered one), designed to take the pulse of the organization, to assess strengths and weaknesses in the areas of trust in leadership, pride in the organization, and meant to help the C-suite identify areas that might pose a risk to the overall performance of the enterprise.

These surveys are usually professionally designed, intelligently administered, and provide rich data sets that can be used for analysis and comparison.  But these surveys, like any survey really, are only truly valuable if they are asking the right, and relevant questions.  They tend to almost exclusively focus inward, i.e. - 'What do you think about your managers?' or 'I have pride in working for this company' type questions are typical.

But I think for many organizations, especially now as the employment market begins to show more and more (halting) steps towards more sustained improvement, the true engagement questions, or really the questions that the C-suite has to have the answer for are outwardly oriented.

In fact, most leaders might only want or need to know the answer to one question, the one question that we never seem to see in these engagement surveys, namely:

If Competitor 'XYZ' offered you $10,000 more (or whatever amount is applicable to put the person in the 'I'd need to think about it mode'), would you take the offer and resign from our company?

Sure, I know what you are saying, no employee would truly want to answer that question, since they would fear a 'Yes' answer would brand them as a 'no-commitment' traitor, and might put their job at risk. And even a 'No' answer might brand someone as having a lack of ambition. So we never ask the one question we really need to have the answer for.

What people say about their attitudes and tendencies is important, but what they actually do is the only thing that ultimately matters. And when good people start leaving the organization, in seeming contradiction to a stellar prior year employee engagement survey, and leadership seems surprised, perhaps it is because you never asked and don't truly understand the only question about engagement and retention that really is telling. 

Or you could have a few more meetings trying to strategize on how to move the 'My office environment is pleasant and comfortable' score up a few points for next year.