Why great employee experience professionals don't rely on just one research method
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One of the questions we often hear is:
"Should we run a survey?"
The answer, of course, is that it depends.
Surveys are incredibly useful. They help us understand patterns, quantify issues and give everyone a voice. If you want to know how widespread a problem is, they're often exactly the right place to start.
But like every research method, they have limitations.
One of the biggest shifts we see in more mature employee experience practice isn't that organisations stop using surveys. It's that they stop expecting surveys to answer every question.
Instead, they become more intentional about matching the research method to the problem they're trying to understand.
For example, if you want to explore why a process feels frustrating, an interview may reveal far more than a questionnaire. If you're trying to generate ideas for improving an experience, a workshop can help participants build on one another's thinking in ways that individual responses never could.
And sometimes, the most valuable insight comes from not asking questions at all.
People are remarkably adaptable. We develop workarounds, shortcuts and habits that help us get through the day, often without even realising we've created them. By the time someone asks us about a process, many of those behaviours have become so routine that we simply don't think to mention them.
That's one of the reasons designers and user researchers often include observational techniques alongside more traditional research methods.
Observation, shadowing and ethnographic research all encourage us to understand work in context rather than relying solely on people's recollections of it. Rather than asking someone to explain how a task works, we watch it happen. We notice where people pause, where they switch between systems, where they create informal processes and where the reality of work differs from the documented process.
These methods won't be appropriate for every project. They can be time-intensive and they don't replace the value of surveys, interviews or workshops.
But they do remind us of something important.
Every research method gives us a different type of insight.
Surveys help us understand scale.
Interviews help us explore experiences in depth.
Workshops allow people to build ideas together.
Observation helps us see what people don't always think to tell us.
None of these approaches is inherently better than another. The skill lies in knowing which combination will help answer the question you're trying to solve.
This is one of the reasons design thinking continues to be such a valuable discipline for employee experience. It encourages us to stay curious for longer, avoid jumping to conclusions and choose research methods deliberately rather than by habit.
As employee experience becomes more established as a profession, perhaps that's one of the biggest opportunities ahead of us.
Not necessarily to collect more data.
But to become better researchers.
The next time you're faced with an employee experience challenge, it's worth asking one simple question before you decide on your methodology.
What am I actually trying to understand?
The answer might still be a survey.
But it might also point you towards an interview, a workshop, observation, shadowing or another approach that helps you see the problem from an entirely different perspective.
The more tools we have in our research toolkit, the more likely we are to design experiences that genuinely reflect how work is lived, not just how it's remembered.