When organisations want to understand what’s happening for their people, the survey is often the first place they turn.
It’s easy to see why. Surveys can reach lots of people quickly, provide measurable data and help identify patterns that might otherwise go unnoticed. Used well, they are an incredibly valuable part of the employee experience toolkit. But that’s only one way of understanding what’s really happening.
Perhaps one of the biggest opportunities for organisations isn’t to ask more questions. It’s to think more broadly about how they generate insight in the first place.
When we’re trying to solve a problem at work, our instinct is often to ask people what they think. We send a survey, organise some interviews or run a workshop. All of these approaches have real value and, at People Lab, they’re methods we use regularly ourselves.
But different research methods answer different questions. Take surveys, for example. They’re excellent at helping us understand how widespread an issue might be. They can tell us whether employees feel supported, whether communication is working or whether a process is causing frustration. What they can’t always tell us is why. That’s often when we turn to interviews, workshops or focus groups to help us build a deeper understanding.
People are very good at describing how they feel, but they’re often less aware of the countless small behaviours and workarounds that have become so normal they no longer notice them. Ask someone whether a process works well and they may say yes. Spend half an hour watching them complete it and you might discover they’re switching between multiple systems, keeping handwritten notes because they don’t trust the data, or relying on a colleague to fill in the gaps.
None of that is because people are giving inaccurate answers. It’s simply that some aspects of work are much easier to observe than they are to describe.
That’s why designers, researchers and social scientists have long used a much broader toolkit to understand people and behaviour.
Alongside surveys, interviews and workshops, they might also use approaches such as observation, shadowing or ethnographic research. Rather than asking people to recall an experience afterwards, these methods focus on understanding work as it happens. They reveal the habits, interruptions, shortcuts and informal ways of working that often shape people’s experiences just as much as formal processes do.
These techniques aren’t appropriate for every project, and they certainly aren’t a replacement for more traditional approaches. But they’re a useful reminder that there is no single ‘best’ way to generate insight.
The method should always follow the question.
If you’re trying to understand how many people are experiencing a particular issue, a survey might be exactly the right choice. If you’re exploring why a process feels difficult or where friction occurs during the working day, interviews, workshops or observation may help uncover things that a questionnaire never could.
The richest understanding often comes from combining different methods, with each one adding another piece to the picture.
This is one of the principles that sits at the heart of design thinking. Good research isn’t about starting with your favourite methodology. It’s about choosing the approach that gives you the best chance of understanding the problem you’re trying to solve.
As organisations continue investing in employee listening, perhaps it’s worth broadening the conversation beyond surveys alone. Not because surveys are flawed, but because they’re only one lens through which we can understand work.
Sometimes the most valuable insight comes from a conversation.
Sometimes it’s hidden in a process that nobody realised had become unnecessarily complicated.
And sometimes, it only becomes visible when someone takes the time to simply watch how work really happens.
The goal isn’t to replace one research method with another.
It’s to build a richer toolkit for understanding people, so that the solutions we design are based on a deeper understanding of work as it’s actually experienced.
Better employee experiences don’t come from asking more questions. They come from asking the right questions, using the right methods and turning insight into meaningful action. That’s exactly where we can help. So, whether you’re redesigning onboarding, improving employee listening or tackling a specific organisational challenge, we can help you build a deeper understanding of what’s really happening for your people, so the solutions you create are grounded in evidence rather than assumption. Want to find out more? We’d love to talk
