Is it Really Survey Fatigue? Or Is It Survey-Action Fatigue. — Dr. Benjamin Granger
About this episode
Dr. Benjamin Granger discusses the disconnect between employee feedback and leadership action, highlighting the importance of communication in addressing survey fatigue.
Ask executives whether they act on the feedback they get from employees, and 85 to 95% will say absolutely. Ask the frontline the same question, and the score drops by 30 to 50 points. That gap is the heart of this episode. Vanessa sits down with Dr. Benjamin Granger, Chief Workplace Psychologist at Qualtrics, a contributor to her book Building a Culture of Evaluation and author of A Leader Worth Following. Together they unpack one of the most persistent findings in Ben's research: most leaders aren't failing to act on feedback — they're failing to communicate the action they took. The connection between what people said and what changed never gets made explicit, so employees conclude nothing happened at all. That, Ben argues, is the real driver of survey fatigue. It isn't that surveys are too long (though many are). It's "survey-in-action fatigue" — people stop responding because they never see their input go anywhere. Close the loop, and engagement follows. Key takeaways: the action gap is usually a communication gap; people stop responding when they never see results; closing the loop builds the trust a culture of evaluation depends on; and even the work you can't publicize…
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