Workplace surveys may be the single most popular and common way of collecting data about how employees within an office work. When change events impacting an office are planned, you can be nearly certain that a survey will be coming out in advance to gauge employee thoughts on various aspects. Insightful questions often include classics such as:
- How many days a week do you plan to work in the office? [a variety of answer options provided]
- How often during the day do you use a meeting room or collaborative space? [a variety of answer options provided]
- What aspects of the office most impact your productivity? [Anyone not answering “technology” has a real problem that probably needs to be solved separately]
- How many days a week does your team get together for collaboration? [a variety of answer options provided]
On the surface, there are no problems with these questions, and they have been asked for decades by workplace practitioners to help design future plans. But the reality is that these questions are almost perfectly engineered to significantly overestimate space requirements without actually gathering data on how an office is really used.
The reason these questions do not really work is that very few individuals have such a simple way of summarizing how they work. These questions are built around the legacy from when there was almost no work-from-home capability. When you cannot work from home, of course, you will have an average number of days in the office which will probably be almost 5 days. As WFH became more common, the question expanded to offer increasing options for days but still assumed employees had to come into the office for something every single week.
Fundamentally, the biggest change in the world is that most professional workers no longer need to be in the office every single week. Given that change, any question asking “per week” will give bad answers. Employees do not yet have a framework for thinking about how often they are in the office. They are going to remember the busiest month on their calendar as the reference for how often they were in during that month. They will provide answers from fear of either answering in a way that their manager may see as wrong (very few people believe in the anonymity of surveys) or not having enough space when they do come into the office. They do not see it as a problem if the office is just a bit too big.
Realistically, if the workplace team does not already know how employees in an office use the space, a survey is not going to magically provide them with the answers. In the same vein, if the workplace team does not already know how employees in an office use the space, they must adopt a conservative design change process because the risk of them accidentally breaking something is high.
This lends itself to the right approach to surveys. First, know what the answers are likely to be in advance and then allow differences to inform your approach. Second, ask the questions in a way that guides employees to what their answers should be in the current context of the world which may require explaining and providing examples. Third, interpret the responses based on known biases and normalize them against what has actually happened historically. Finally, have a clear communication plan to explain, educate, and introduce what has happened and what is planned to the impacted colleagues.
Surveys have a time and place, without question. But they are almost never a silver bullet on their own.