Leading Independent Researcher Slams Employee Surveys
November 15, 2005 (London, UK) — Speaking at an ICG (Independent Consultants Group) gathering last Thursday, Peter Hutton, managing director of BrandEnergy Research slammed the way employee research has evolved in this country and overseas.
“Many, perhaps most, employee surveys, now consist of agree/disagree attitude statements and nothing else.” He said. “This is absurd. It implies that the only thing that matters in an organisation is people’s attitudes – not their behaviours, not their motivations, not their knowledge or understanding, just their attitudes.”
“In the vast majority of cases when an agree/disagree question is used it is not the most appropriate question to ask for the issue concerned” he said.
Hutton, now an independent market research consultant, was a director of MORI and the first person in the UK to write a book about how to use surveys in management. Hutton last week went on to say how such surveys often produce results that are inactionable because they do not define what the real issues are.
Hutton was particularly scathing of the practice of offering clients a set of standard agree/disagree statements and lots of norms. “The implication is that every business should be aspiring to fit a model that consists of high scores on those fixed norms. This is ridiculous” he said. “To be successful businesses should work out their own business models and use research to understand how effectively they are working. By adopting these surveys, without realising it, clients are allowing their businesses to be subverted into adopting business success models that consist of conforming to a set of normative measures developed for a different organisation, probably in a different country and devised by people who have no understanding of their business at all.”
Commenting on the talk, Chairman of the ICG, Tim Williams, stressed the significant benefits independent consultants can bring to their clients because of the independence of their thinking and the depth of their experience. “What clients appreciate about independent consultants is independent thinking based on real experience. What they want us to deliver is a fresh perspective which focuses on the client’s real needs - we aren’t constrained by a corporate mantra and we don’t try to impose ‘one size fits all’ solutions. Normative measures have their uses, but they can be a double-edged sword – they offer the apparent advantage of comparability, but often at the price of becoming increasingly irrelevant,” added Williams.
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