The Brand Risk of Ignoring the Employee Say-Do Gap

Image credit: Campaign Creators via Unsplash

The engagement gap. It’s what we call the difference between the brand image that a company presents to the outside world and the real experience of employees on the inside.

Engagement gaps can have a negative impact on brand advocacy. If employees perceive that the company isn’t walking the talk when it comes to the employer brand it promotes, employee net promoter scores will plummet and they will be less likely to recommend the company to customers and job-seeking talent.

Engagement gaps can also be expensive for organisations. According to the Harvard Business Review, a negative reputation can cost a company at least 10% more per hire, which is the average salary increase demanded by employees to take a job at such a company.

Most employee surveys ignore 95% of the thinking brain

The first important step to avoiding an expensive engagement gap is to learn how employees really feel about the different drivers that influence their engagement at work. 

Today, most companies rely on the annual employee engagement survey to gather this vital insight.

But the problem with most of the popular engagement survey platforms is that they are designed to capture feedback from the part of our brain that makes only 5% of our daily decisions.

In his book,Thinking Fast and Slow, the Nobel prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman describes the brain as comprising two thinking and decision making systems. System 1 is the fast, emotional, automatic part of the brain that makes 95% of our daily decisions and System 2 is the slow, reflective, conscious and effortful part of the brain that accounts for the other 5%.

We use our ‘fast’ System 1 brain for automatic tasks like walking or riding a bike and our ‘slow’ System 2 brain for problem solving tasks like filling in a tax return or completing an employee engagement survey.

Because our brain has these two systems, there can often be a difference between what people say in the annual employee survey and their true feelings and behaviours at work; a phenomenon commonly known as the say-do gap.

The say-do gap first emerged as an idea during the 1990s in relation to the discrepancy between people’s attitudes and behaviours surrounding environmental issues and the thinking is now baked into the market research strategies of most successful businesses.

But, while most companies factor the say-do gap into their customer insight, surprisingly few appear to consider it when it comes to understanding the motivations and actions of their people.

The tools and platforms that most businesses use to survey employee engagement are not, on their own, always a reliable indicator of employee behaviour, because many of our actions are subconsciously driven by the instinctive System 1 part of the brain. 

A say-do gap among employees should be seen as more than a mere curiosity for businesses because it can quickly lead to a damaging engagement gap if businesses spend time focusing on the wrong priorities due to misleading insight gleaned from analysis of the engagement survey results.

For example, an employee may rationally say in the engagement survey that they think their organisation supports a diverse and inclusive culture, but that same individual may subsequently choose to leave the business because, deep down, they don’t feel a sense of belonging at the company.

Introducing behavioural science to employee insight

To assess and address the say-do gap inside businesses, I’ve been working with VCCP’s behavioural science business Cowry Consulting to develop an engagement survey tool that measures the subconscious System 1 thoughts and feelings that play a major role in influencing employee actions and behaviours. We will be sharing a case study with a little more detail about our methodology shortly.

By analysing the implicit test responses alongside the rational System 2 feedback gathered in the annual employee engagement survey, we believe we can get a far more accurate picture of how employees feel about the different drivers of their engagement and the impact this is likely to have on their behaviour and actions at work.

Capturing and understanding the subconscious emotions and thoughts that drive employee behaviour will help businesses to far more accurately diagnose where the real engagement pain points are for their employees. Businesses will also be better able to manage the engagement gap, which will in turn help boost their employee NPS scores and inspire more consistent, positive and truthful endorsement from their people on social media.