(Editor’s Note: Today’s post is brought to you by our friends at SilkRoad, whose passion is creating a world-class employee experience. I just returned from their annual users’ conference – three days of networking, education and fun. I wrote a post about their great event over on the SilkRoad blog. Hope you’ll check it out here!)

According to SilkRoad’s TalentTalk Research Program, the most popular way companies measure employee engagement is via their annual employee survey (59%). Since employee surveys should never be done haphazardly, this puts the development, implementation and communication of an employee survey front and center.

Employee opinion surveys are used for a variety of reasons. I’ve always looked at them as a way to converse with employees about the workplace. They provide a tremendous amount of data. But I believe it’s short-sighted to view them as a report card about how things are going. Because while there’s a lot of data that is gleaned from surveys, it’s never the whole story.

Surveys offer the ability to receive feedback at every level:

Organizationally, a survey can identify company ...

A few weeks ago I wrote about how important it is that we offer awards that have some substantive value to them, in order to “put our money where our mouths are” and ensure proportion and fairness.

A few weeks before that, I wrote about how mistaking “pointsification” for gamification could backfire on employers, and how important it is that we be thoughtful when we gamify a solution, and not get caught up in bells whistles and leaderboards.

Ordinarily I don’t get all self-referential, but when I saw the Dilbert comic below from this Sunday’s paper, I was pretty tickled at how it segued with those two posts. I wanted to give Scott Adams a high five. (Click the image to see it larger.)

© DILBERT 2013 Scott Adams. Used By permission of UNIVERSAL UCLICK. All rights reserved.

Not only does Adams reference the current problems with outdated performance reviews, but he also gets right to the heart of the need for meaningful recognition and reward.  Adopting any solution simply because it is trendy is a grave error that will likely backfire on a company.

Now don’t get me wrong. Gamification has its place. I wrote all about that ...

Recently, I have been repetitively reinforcing the importance of creating exceptional employee and customer experiences. I’ve talked about the economic benefits that the results produce. I’ve also talked about the correlations between leveraging enabled and engaged employees and the impact that it has on net promoter scores and customer loyalty. And thus, bottom line financial results.

Often times, when people think about enhancing employee or customer experiences they mistakenly think that experience enhancement is going to cost them more money.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Consistently and repeatedly in every industry across the globe I have witnessed that employee and customer experience improvement always coincides with and process improvements and cost reductions.

I have previously written that it is impossible for external experiences to be stronger or better than internal experiences.

That doesn’t mean it takes more time, energy or more financial resources.

When engaged employees consistently do the right thing, the right way, at the right time, for the right reasons, fantastic results follow.

These results include positive impact in ...

Recognize This! – Strategy can only be executed by those who intimately understand strategic objectives and their role in it.

Strategy is one of my passions. I’m fortunate that helping clients formulate strategy is also my job. Indeed, my title is Vice President, Client Strategy and Consulting. I greatly enjoy my work helping organizations of all stripes develop a strategy for proactive management of their company culture. Yet, I also believe that everyone is (or should be) strategist in their organization.

Two pieces on strategy I read last week helped me coalesce my thinking. First, from Strategy + Business comes the ideas of Cynthia Montgomery, Timken Professor of Business Administration and former chair of the strategy unit at Harvard Business School. The article describes Montgomery’s approach to strategy this way:

“When you look at strategy as a frame of mind to be cultivated, rather than as a plan to be executed, you are far more likely to succeed over the long run… To Montgomery, a business strategist is not primarily an analyst of position, or of resources; nor is the strategist purely adaptive, responding reactively to the vagaries of ...