You're sitting in a leadership meeting, reviewing the status of several projects that should have been completed weeks ago. The operations director is frustrated because her team keeps waiting on decisions from other departments. The head of customer service says his employees aren't getting the information they need to prepare for changes. Another leader points out that everyone is already stretched thin, and the constant back-and-forth is making it difficult to get anything finished. The conversation keeps returning to the same conclusion: departments just aren't collaborating effectively.
As the person responsible for helping the organization address these challenges, you're listening carefully. You know the delays are affecting more than project schedules. Employees are spending time chasing answers, managers are struggling to meet commitments, and senior leaders are losing confidence that important work will get done.
But you notice something. Each leader is describing the problem from a different perspective. Everyone agrees that collaboration is the issue, but what's actually causing the work to stall is less clear.
Then someone suggests an employee survey. And it's a reasonable idea. A survey could help you hear from employees across the organization and identify patterns in their experiences. And you want to respond to the concerns leaders have raised.
But you also want the time employees spend giving feedback to lead somewhere useful. The last thing the organization needs is another set of results confirming that people are frustrated without helping anyone figure out what needs to change. So before you start writing survey questions, there's a more important question to ask yourself: What do you actually need to understand, and what kind of evidence will help you understand it?
What are you assuming about the problem?
The survey suggestion is gaining traction. Given what you've heard in the meeting, it would make sense to ask employees about communication between departments. So you begin considering questions about whether employees receive information when they need it, whether colleagues respond promptly to requests, and whether responsibilities are clearly communicated.
They’re all reasonable questions, but there's actually an assumption built into them:
You've started investigating communication because that's how leaders described the problem—not because you've established that communication is what's causing the delays.
What if employees are sharing information, but no one is sure who has authority to approve the next step? What if departments understand one another's priorities but are held accountable for competing goals? Or what if the approval process itself creates delays, regardless of how well people communicate? Employees might describe all three situations as poor collaboration. Yet each points to different organizational conditions and potentially requires different responses.
Research on relational coordination helps explain why these distinctions matter. Coordinating work across departments involves more than exchanging information. Working relationships, shared understanding, and the organizational conditions supporting interdependent work all influence how effectively people can accomplish things together.
A survey focused on communication could provide valuable information about employees' experiences. But it might not reveal the organizational conditions contributing to those experiences. And if the evidence points leaders toward more project updates or cross-functional meetings when the real obstacle is unclear decision-making authority, the organization could invest in changes that leave the delays largely untouched.
What might you discover by investigating a delayed project?
Consider one of the projects discussed in the leadership meeting: a new service launch that was supposed to be completed six weeks ago. Several departments were involved, and everyone agrees that communication was difficult. But what actually happened?
You start by reviewing the project timeline, tracing when work was completed, when it moved between departments, and where progress slowed. Then you speak with people involved at different stages of the project. Instead of asking whether communication between departments was effective, you ask them to walk you through a particular moment when work stopped.
What were they waiting for? What did they understand needed to happen next? Who did they believe was responsible for making the decision? What happened when that decision didn't come? You also speak with people on both sides of the delayed handoffs. What one team experienced as a lack of responsiveness might have looked quite different to the team receiving the request.
Consider one particular delay. The project team says it waited two weeks for another department to approve a decision. From their perspective, the other team wasn't communicating or responding quickly enough. But when you speak with the receiving department, you learn that the request arrived with the necessary information. The employees understood what was being asked. They simply didn’t realize they had authority to approve it without involving a senior leader.
Now you're investigating something different. Was senior leadership approval actually required? Had employees received conflicting instructions about who could make the decision? Or had involving a senior leader become an informal practice that no one had questioned?
You compare this project with others. Do delays occur at similar decision points? Are some departments able to move work forward without the same approvals? What accounts for those differences? By examining project records alongside the accounts of people involved, you can begin to distinguish what happened from how different employees experienced it. You can also check whether an emerging explanation fits the evidence across more than one project. Examining specific events helps you identify what might be contributing to the problems employees describe as poor collaboration.
The approach reflects a principle in organizational research: the methods used to investigate a problem should fit both the question being asked and what you already know about it. When the factors shaping a problem aren't yet clear, you can use exploratory inquiry to help identify what needs closer examination.
Of course, an actual investigation might reveal something different. Communication could turn out to be the central difficulty, or several conditions could be contributing to the delays. But you'd be making your next decision based on a more grounded understanding of what's happening, rather than relying entirely on the explanation that emerged in the leadership meeting.
When would an employee survey help?
Your investigation has changed how you understand the problem. What initially looked like poor communication now appears, at least in several projects, to involve uncertainty about who has authority to make decisions. But how widespread is that uncertainty? Is it affecting the entire organization or mainly certain departments? Does it arise in particular kinds of projects?
This is where an employee survey could actually help. You have a clearer understanding of the problem, and a survey could show how widely employees experience it and whether those experiences differ across departments, roles, or types of work. You could ask employees about the situations you've identified and examine how their experiences differ across departments, roles, or types of work. That information might help leaders determine where changes are most needed. You could also use a survey later to assess whether employees experience greater clarity after approval responsibilities are revised.
A survey becomes more useful when you have a clear question you need it to answer. Of course, question design still matters. Research on cognitive interviewing shows why it's important to understand how respondents interpret survey questions. An employee who reports poor collaboration might be thinking about slow responses, unclear authority, or competing priorities. Those experiences can produce similar ratings while pointing toward different organizational problems. Questions grounded in what you've learned about how the work actually happens are more likely to produce results that leaders can interpret and put to use.
And there's another possibility worth considering: you may not need another employee survey at all.
When is it time to act rather than collect more data?
You don't always need to know how widespread a problem is before deciding what to do about it. If project records and conversations with employees have revealed a recurring approval bottleneck, you may already have enough evidence to begin addressing it. The question is whether surveying more employees would change the action you take. If it wouldn't, another round of data collection might just delay progress on fixing the issue.
Research on employee survey follow-up emphasizes the importance of what happens after information is collected: how organizations interpret findings, develop responses, and follow through on their decisions. The value of employee feedback depends in part on how it informs what the organization does next.
In this case, leaders might begin by clarifying approval responsibilities in one workflow. You could then examine whether decisions move more efficiently and whether the change creates any new difficulties before considering a broader rollout. That approach doesn't require every uncertainty to be resolved. It requires enough understanding to make a thoughtful change and a way to learn from what happens afterward.
The goal isn't to collect as much information as possible. It's to understand the problem well enough to make a better decision—and recognize when you have enough evidence to act.
Make sure you're investigating the problem you need to solve
Think back to that leadership meeting. Projects were falling behind, frustration was growing, and everyone wanted to understand why departments were struggling to work together. An employee survey seemed like a sensible place to start.
But imagine if you'd gone straight to surveying employees about communication. You might have received hundreds of responses confirming that employees were frustrated by how departments worked together. Leaders could have responded with more frequent project updates, new communication guidelines, or additional opportunities for teams to collaborate.
Those changes might have helped in some ways. But if unclear decision-making authority was a significant reason projects kept stalling, they wouldn't necessarily have addressed it. And months later, you may well find yourself in another leadership meeting, discussing the same missed deadlines.
That's what makes the decision about how to investigate so consequential. A survey can be carefully designed and produce reliable results while leaving important explanations unexplored. It can answer the questions you asked without answering the questions that would help you decide what needs to change. The issue isn't whether another employee survey is a good idea. It's whether a survey is the right way to investigate the problem in front of you.
Because collecting more data won't move your organization forward if it leaves the real problem untouched.
Not sure what you need to understand next?
Download my free guide, What Are You Trying to Understand? It will help you take stock of what you already know, identify the questions your existing information can't answer, and decide what you need to investigate before making your next move.