As I made my way to the local pharmacy on a crisp Manhattan evening in late October, I saw a good many ghouls, vampires, and zombies on the sidewalk. While Halloween was still a few days off – the parties would seem to have begun.
Soon, I was perusing the items in the candy aisle, and I was struck by the labels on these “food” items for the soon-to-be visiting trick-or-treaters. There were remarkable levels of detail on the nutritional value, or the lack thereof, on each of the brightly colored packages.
Then, my gaze turned to a defeated-looking employee working at the pick-up desk at the pharmacy counter whose line of a dozen customers didn’t look thrilled by the pace of their progress. I wondered if this employee had anything like the level of insight on “what was inside” the job they’d taken as I’d had from reviewing the candy packages. A job is a far more important life decision than a candy purchase. Yet, if the job description were like most I’ve seen, there would be little in the way of “career nutrition facts” (or the lack thereof) or “% this job represents of a human’s required daily fulfillment value.”
Of course, these things might not be very easy to quantify compared with analyzing the ingredients of a sweet treat in a lab. Different people will want very different things in terms of a job. However, most employers have gathered a lot of information on the employee experience over time, and many modern employee engagement surveys have robust science behind them, measuring sentiment on dozens of factors and will often even compare the employer’s scores to a cohort of peer companies.
This kind of employee engagement data might never be as definitive as “21% of daily carbohydrate requirement” but could be a huge upgrade on not offering any data at all. The status quo here is ripe for disruption. Data-centric candidates who like to have their step counts and heart rates constantly measured have to settle for a very muddy window or “glass door” into the employee experience at their prospective employers. A platform like Glassdoor may offer input from, if you’re very lucky, 8% of the employee base of a company, but employee engagement surveys will often get participation from 80%+ of a team.
My modest proposal is that employers publish their employee engagement survey results on their careers pages! This might sound way more like a trick than a treat, but this level of transparency could be a huge differentiator and trust-builder. Perfection would not be expected, as every employer has their issues, but imagine the power of publicly sharing positive trend lines where problem areas are being improved over time and strengths are being cemented over time.
Of course, if your organization is not invested in improving the employee experience, you may not want to air your dirty linen in public with all those scores heading in the wrong direction. However, if you are taking the time and effort to gather data, surface problems, and address them, you should get credit for these investments!
If you’ve carefully crafted values that you’ve painstakingly identified as important to your culture and stay true to them in your day-to-day actions, shouldn’t this be worn on your sleeve like a badge of honor?
Furthermore, as this kind of bold public sharing of internal engagement scores has no “industry standard” imposed by the FDA or some other entity, you could choose which dimensions of the employee experience you want to track and publish. Maybe the aspects of the employee experience Glassdoor asks about never quite lined up with the most important advantages that working for your organization offers. Wouldn’t it be better to be judged against the bars your business has set vs. bars set by someone else?
So, this scary season, I urge you to consider radical transparency on internal employee engagement scores. The “great resignation” may be in the rearview mirror right now, but the next time it’s an employees’ market, wouldn’t it be great to be seen as a transparent organization that’s proud to share how it’s always looking to better keep its own promises? In a tricky world of work, that sure sounds like a treat to me!
