Company after company conducts employee opinion surveys to find the magic bullet that will ignite their workforce.

The usual method of asking for opinions in a one-to-five format and allowing employee anonymity seldom gets results. Why should it? First of all, one-to-five thinking doesn't provide the background behind employees' thoughts. For example, if you ask what they think of your benefits program and they give it a low grade, this might be because their last employer had a ridiculously expensive program.

It's better to get information that you can use immediately.

Rather than using the one-to-five format, we suggest that you ask three questions over a wide variety of subject areas:

• What's going right?
• What can go better (not, "What don't you like")?
• What else would you like to share?

Opinion surveys are anonymous because of management concern that employees might fear speaking up. It would be better if both parties cut past the fear and began an honest, above-the-table discussion. Lack of anonymity also allows you to follow up with the specific concerns of individual employees.

Don't expect all employees to jump into this approach with both feet. Some will just dabble in the water and see if anyone else gets their head lopped off. However, once they find management making a sincere effort, eventually they'll jump in with both feet.

You can either focus surveys on individual subjects at monthly meetings (i.e. survey benefits this month, training in the next month, the working environment in the following month, etc.), or you can do it all at once. Above all, acknowledge that you've heard the employees and then set priorities, letting them know that you'll commit to no more than three new strategies at a time. If you over-commit, and fail to live up to even a trivial commitment, your employees will be quick to play victim games.