The Survey Trap: from feedback to frustration.

Employee surveys have become something of a ritual. They’re not always designed to drive change. They’re designed because someone, somewhere, thinks it’s what a good organisation should do. So they get sent out, results get rolled up into tidy scores, and those scores get tracked over time. But the focus drifts from impact to optics. From listening to scoring. From action to appearance.

That’s the real issue. Not that surveys exist, or that people are tired of giving feedback. It’s that they’ve become performative. An annual performance review for the organisation, filled with charts and a few carefully chosen quotes, but very little depth and even less follow-through. In too many cases, the goal becomes a better number next year, not a better experience next week.

Professor Gary Martin captured the issue perfectly in a recent post. He described employee engagement surveys as the workplace equivalent of a confessional booth: people open up, share frustrations, and answer honestly under the protection of anonymity, only for that honesty to disappear into silence. The questions are searching, the responses often revealing, but the follow-up is shallow.

What stood out most was how clearly it exposed the disconnect between intent and outcome. Employees give their time and their thoughts, expecting something meaningful to come from it. Instead, the responses are distilled into averages and vague themes, then passed around in decks that rarely land with the people who could actually make a difference. The opportunity exists. But too often, it’s wasted.

It's critical to give employees the opportunity to tell you what they think. You can’t build a meaningful workplace without listening to the people in it. But the way we go about it needs serious review. Too often, the approach is focused more on producing a report than creating change. The surveys are polished, the results are packaged, but the action that follows is either unclear or underwhelming.

Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time inside organisations wrestling with this. Whether it’s HR trying to own the survey but not the outcomes, or property teams left holding the insight because they’re the only ones paying attention to the lived experience, the same patterns repeat. That’s why I’ve started to write down a few things I’ve learned. Not as a checklist, but as a reflection of what it takes to make employee feedback actually useful.

HR often owns the survey but not the full picture.

One of the challenges we regularly hear from workplace, FM and CRE teams is simply getting a survey out. In most organisations, there’s a bureaucratic process in place and HR ultimately holds the keys. That makes sense on the surface. Employee surveys are seen as part of “people stuff.” But it creates two big problems.

First, HR tends to look through a single lens. So you get questions about motivation, values, and line manager relationships, but very little about the physical environment people are working in. And almost nothing about the tech they rely on to get work done. Two huge contributors to how people feel and perform are missing entirely.

Second, when HR blocks other teams from surveying, or restricts it to a single question about “your workspace,” the data that comes back is often unhelpful. A percentage score. No context. No explanation. No action. And that brings me to the next point.

HR hands off the results with no real support

We’re often told that Audiem could make waves in the HR space, and I agree. So last year, we spent time speaking to HR Directors and potential tech partners to understand where the gaps were. What stood out was this: there isn’t a huge appetite to improve the insight. The data is collected, packaged, and handed straight to managers with a message that effectively says, “Here’s your team’s results. Now go and fix it.”

The problem is, those managers are rarely equipped to make sense of what they’ve been given. The numbers might be low, but without context, the only thing they can really do is guess. Maybe someone sends out a calendar invite for a team pizza and a chat. But without knowing the root cause, it becomes a box-ticking exercise. A vague attempt at something that probably misses the point entirely.

Line charts and guess work

This is the heart of it. Most engagement surveys focus on scores, not insight. A tangle of rating scales and matrices that promise to tell you where your problems are, but never really explain why.

Quantitative scoring has its place, but it was never designed to carry the weight of employee voice. You can’t boil down motivation, belonging or frustration into a number and expect to know what to do next. You just get a score. And then you’re left guessing.

Take a team with low motivation. The cause might be clunky systems, poor management, unclear goals, or a team dynamic that’s gone off the rails. But unless you ask the right questions and let people answer in their own words, you’ll never know. You’ll make assumptions, throw in a few well-intentioned initiatives, and next year the score will be the same. Or worse, because people have lost patience. They told you, nothing changed.

That’s why Audiem was built to process qualitative data. Not just because we can, thanks to AI, but because it’s the right method for this kind of work. For the past two decades, we’ve defaulted to scores because we didn’t have the tools to scale qualitative feedback. That’s no longer the case.

And here’s the surprising thing. Because they’re listening more carefully, the property and workplace teams we work with are now closer to the employee voice than many HR teams. When you give people the space to talk, they don’t just answer the question. They tell you everything. And with the right tools, that insight becomes action. That action builds trust. And that trust leads to even more insight.

It’s what Professor Rob Briner was getting at in one of our first ever Workplace Geeks episodes. Too much focus on scores, not enough on cause. We keep measuring what’s easy to count, not what matters. And that’s why we’re stuck. You can’t solve what you don’t understand.

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