Employee Surveys & Reviews

There’s an interesting discussion about the link between reviews within the company and employee satisfaction, and it’s not limited to the effects that internal reviews have on satisfaction. Annual reviews are also representative of another problem – central tendency bias. Managers are taught that when they fill out annual reviews, they should not give perfect scores for perfect employees.

There is a belief that employees should believe that they can always improve, since an employee review is designed to teach employees how to improve, not necessarily grade them on their past performance. But this also showcases a serious issue – the unwillingness to give people an accurate rating simply because you do not like rating things to the extreme. There are many possible issues that can be taken from this: If an employee is perfect at some skill but they are given scores that do not indicate this perfection, you may be needlessly harming their satisfaction for the sake of not being too gushing with praise.

When your employees complete satisfaction surveys, imagine how many different ways this may affect the result: Great employees may not be willing to give perfect scores for the same reason, even if your business satisfies them perfectly in any given area. Employees that do not show central tendency bias may not be giving honest answers, because very few employees would ever rate their business as perfect, even if it is. Both of these benefits may lead to too much statistical noise in your data, and may cause your data to be less useful.

This also highlights the problem with all surveys if the importance of honesty in your survey is not well understood. Certainly annual reviews are not necessarily honest if managers are avoiding perfect scores for the purpose of wanting improvement. Annual reviews, employee satisfaction, and other types of surveys and grading systems all suffer from a major problem – people are simply unwilling to give perfect scores because there is a belief that people (and businesses) can always get better.

That is one of the main ways that satisfaction surveys are so similar to quarterly reviews – and another reason that you should be hesitant to take all of the responses at face value. If employees or managers are rounding down with their answers, the meaning and benefit of your numbers changes with them, in addition to issues you have with satisfaction as a result of those reviews.