Culture surveys: the hidden costs of a false sense of transparency
its time for HR to pivot.
Culture surveys have become a staple of modern HR practice. Platforms like Culture Amp, Qualtrics, and Peakon are part of a booming employee engagement software market worth more than USD $1.2 billion in 2025, projected to grow to USD $3.5 billion by 2032. Companies spend millions each year subscribing to these tools, hoping to get a read on how their people are feeling.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth - culture surveys are often misleading, create a false sense of security. Simply put, if your employees can only tell you how they feel anonymously, then you don’t have a culture of trust and psychosocial safety.
While employees are technically “giving feedback,” the anonymous mechanism signals a deeper absence of mutual trust. In my 30 years in HR, I’ve overseen countless culture surveys, and not one has ever provided a genuine reflection of the true sentiment within the organisation.
THE ILLUSION OF INSIGHT
Culture surveys are often presented as the ultimate source of truth about employee engagement and organisational health but in our experience, it is more often than not, deeply misleading. Here are some reasons why we state this:
Snapshot timing: A single survey is a snap shot that can miss cyclical pressures, recent incidents, or the day to day dynamics that determine culture. Benchmarking from one period to another is just flawed analysis and doesn’t contemplate key leadership or strategy changes, and why do you only care at that point in time, why not all the time?
Aggregation masks micro issues: Aggregated scores (by department, region or global) can hide small pockets of impactful dysfunction. A “good” overall score can coexist with toxic micro cultures that never surface in headline metrics.
Context and culture differences reduce comparability: Cross cultural or cross business/department comparisons using the same instrument can be misleading; norms, language and local leadership behaviours change how questions are interpreted. Benchmarks aren’t ‘one size fits all’.
The Myth of Anonymity: When surveys promise anonymity and people are skeptical, you have low trust. People who doubt the ‘confidentiality filter’ will withhold truth or skew answers for fear of being identified. If people need to stay anonymous to say how they feel, then the survey isn’t a tool for transparency, it’s a mirror reflecting the lack of trust in the organisation.
Forced Completion Rates: One of the most insidious aspects is the obsession with completion rates. Leaders and HR teams often treat high participation as a measure of success. We’ve seen leaders compete internally on completion percentages, and HR push for 100% completion, as if it proves engagement. This is deeply problematic for these reasons:
If you have to force or nag people to complete your survey this tells you all you need to know!
Forced responses often lead to distorted data, either retaliation (‘I’ll make it bad’), or compliance (‘I’ll say its good so I’m not noticed’), or apathy (‘I’ll fence sit because its pointless’).
When the metric becomes completion your agenda is compliance not engagement.
A culture of silence is a symptom of low psychosocial safety, when you force people to complete a survey, you are not eliminating the fear that drives silence, you are reinforcing it.
Relying on culture surveys as a credible source of intelligence is risky, it is data that can give false confidence, obscure real problems, and delay interventions that would address disengagement, poor communication, and low psychological safety.
THE REAL PROBLEM: a lack of psychological safety
When surveys are the primary tool for listening, it’s often because the workplace lacks psychological safety. In a truly safe and open culture, people don’t need anonymity to share what’s on their mind. Rather, people thrive when they feel free to:
Speak truth to power
Challenge the status quo
Share barriers and frustrations
Offer ideas without fear of retribution
Research consistently shows that psychosocial safety drives innovation, performance and results and consistently outperform others.
THE BUSINESS CASE: Silence and distrust are costly
The true cost of relying on culture surveys, instead of investing in initiatives that build trust and psychological safety where surveys are not required, is significant. When employees don’t feel safe to speak openly we see:
Financial Impact: Absenteeism, disengagement, psychological injuries and stress related issues cost organisations multiple times more than physical injuries.
Productivity Impact: Lack of open dialogue slows decision-making, stifles innovation, and allows performance issues to fester.
Retention Risk: When employees fear reprisal or believe their voice doesn’t matter, turnover rises. Recruiting and training replacements adds additional cost and disrupts organisational continuity.
Ultimately, the cost of a culture where feedback is only safe behind a screen far outweighs the cost of investing in developing emotionally intelligent leaders who in turn, foster the right culture through real time engagement practices.
PSYCHO SAFETY VS SURVEYS - a comparative overview
The need for employees to contribute insights, ideas, views and opinions anonymously is the antithesis of a high performing, psychologically safe work environment.
THE SMARTER APPROACH - emotional intelligence
The most effective approach is to invest in emotionally intelligent leadership. Leaders with high emotional intelligence understand their own emotions, recognise and respond to the emotions of others, and can manage challenges with empathy and clarity.
They create space for people to speak openly, encourage healthy debate, and navigate disagreements constructively, they find teachable moments. They don’t take feedback personally or make it about themselves; instead, they actively value diverse perspectives and alternative ways of working, recognising that different viewpoints strengthen decision making, innovation, and team performance.
They listen to different points of view, embrace the fact that they don’t need to have all the answers, and purposefully invest time and energy in frequent conversations that go beyond tasks to focus on what people need, and want, to be great.
These leaders identify and leverage individual strengths, foster accountability, and cultivate trust, creating an environment where employees feel safe to challenge the status quo, share ideas, and are inspired to do their best work. By developing such leaders, organisations don’t just improve engagement, they build a culture that is mutually beneficial.
HOW TO PIVOT
Build trust through behaviour, not surveys.
Invest in developing emotionally intelligence leadership capability to equip leaders with the emotional intelligence skills to handle feedback constructively, role model vulnerability, and inspire growth.
Focus on transparency, accountability, and openness. Teach leaders how to create environments where employees can speak freely without fear.
Mandate regular, purposeful conversations, not annual surveys and give leaders the tools if they need them, like our Coach. purposeful conversations tool here.
Feedback without follow through is worse than no feedback at all. If you are wedded to your survey, as a minimum, delve deeper than the data with workshops, individual conversations, and take meaningful, visible action. This earlier article on this topic is worth a read here.
If you need to solicit feedback anonymously or rely on people responding from behind a screen, it’s a sign of a deeper cultural problem. In a healthy, high performing organisation, people speak freely and frequently. Leaders know what’s happening on the ground, there are no hidden frustrations or deep issues festering in silence, and there are no surprises because they have their finger on the pulse. Relying on surveys as the primary way to ‘hear’ your workforce is a symptom, not a solution.
What’s baffling is that so many companies persist, when the alternative is both simpler and far more powerful (yet companies are still doing traditional performance reviews, also baffling).
Training leaders to hold frequent, individual, purposeful conversations gives a far richer, real time picture of their own effectiveness, team sentiment, performance, and culture.
Unlike surveys, these conversations surface nuance, context, and emerging issues before they escalate. They also provide for teachable moments (read our article here) to aid growth and development. When leaders are equipped with the emotional intelligence skills of empathy, social awareness, and relationship management, they don’t need anonymous data to know how their people are really doing, they create the trust and openness that makes honest feedback a daily habit rather than an periodic event.
