Finding the Truth: Why Diagnostics Reveal What Employee Surveys Miss

The truth is an employer's only shield against organizational confusion. The truth about your organization, if you truly listen to it, lays out a plan for you; asking you what to fix, what to focus on, and what to celebrate. But most executives operate on instinct and anecdote; they drive their ship based on their gut and not on metrics or consensus.

I coach senior leaders that they should never make any changes, adjustments or training decisions until they know what's true now. I can hear the answer coming before they open their lips: “We’ve already done a survey.”

But when I ask to see the survey and its results, it often tells me less than a single hallway conversation would.

The questions are abstract. The responses are rushed. The results are sliced into pie charts and have shockingly little connection to what’s observable. What’s missing is the actual texture of the workday. Surveys often gather the most surface-level version of the truth, especially when employees are weary of being asked, unsure who’s reading, or concerned their answers aren’t truly anonymous. The result is data that feels clean, but lacks the context leaders need to make confident decisions.

The Problem with the Checkbox

Surveys are often intended to give voice to employees. But the truth is, they rarely do. Most internal surveys are written from a neutral, academic distance. They don’t invite much. They don’t feel personal or safe. They use language that feels like it was written for a textbook instead of a team. And people fill them out accordingly. Between meetings, over lunch, while answering Teams messages on the side.

The number one limiting factor in employees sharing honesty and detail: they often know that nothing really tends to happen afterward. “Why,” they ask themselves, “should I go through the vulnerable exercise of creatively describing my truth when it just becomes a statistic?"

That’s why we recommend something a little different. Instead of asking, How engaged are you on a scale of 1-5?, We ask questions like: What part of your day makes you want to fake a Wi-Fi outage? What drives you crazy at work? If you had a magic wand, what would vanish from your workflow? Running a simple survey with humanized questions like this will begin to unearth hidden realities.

This is the beginning of building what I call a Hate Map. And, yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like. A Hate Map is a visual display, similar to a weather heatmap, of all the little daily irritants that employees secretly loathe. Reports that get ignored. Meetings that never end. Processes that make them feel like they’re being punished for having a job. It’s funny at first, until you realize how much time and energy is buried under all that silent friction.

When executives take a good long stare at the red portions of this graphic, it tells them where to take action.

Diagnostics: A DEXA Scan For Your Organization

A DEXA scan is a quick, non-invasive test that looks beneath the surface to reveal hidden health issues like low bone density and dangerous visceral fat. It provides a detailed picture of your body composition to help catch problems early, before they become serious.

The next step beyond a hate map is to run a full diagnostic, similar to a DEXA scan. I have become such an enormous fan of this tool that we begin almost every initiative with one.

Diagnostics, like a medical full body scan, are designed to get underneath the surface. They reveal what work actually feels like. And they give leaders something that traditional surveys never do: a story for which they get to write the next chapter.

An in-depth diagnostic includes three parts:

First, do surveys.

But rewrite them entirely. Every question needs to be reworked into simple, human language. We want people to respond from the raw, real parts of themselves.

Next, conduct one-on-one interviews.

This is where nuance emerges. When people talk to someone directly, especially when it’s clear the conversation is safe and confidential, they share more. They tell the truth behind the checkbox. They often say things like, “You know, I didn’t even realize how strongly I felt until I started talking about it.”

Finally, host focus groups.

These are small, cross-functional sessions where different teams reflect together. One person remembers something that triggers someone else’s insight. That back-and-forth often reveals the deeper mechanics of inefficiency; where time is lost, processes break down, or teams misalign. These sessions help reveal operational friction points that quietly erode performance.

When all three layers are complete, that’s when you build a report. But it’s no longer just a data summary, it’s a narrative. It tells the story of how people are experiencing their work. It captures friction, burnout, missed opportunities, and cultural truths. And most importantly, it gives leaders a clear view forward.

A Note on What You Might Be Missing

Almost all companies are moving fast right now. New technology, new priorities, new roles forming almost as quickly as others vanish. And in that speed, the temptation is strong to package “the people part” into something tidy. A few survey stats. A slide or two in the transformation deck. Maybe a town hall and a Teams update.

But when that happens, what looks like competitive pacing is often just shallow input. Surveys won’t flag operational misalignments that cut directly into your ability to execute.

Diagnostics will. Because they don’t just extract answers, they create space. They make room for the stories people have been holding onto, often for years, waiting for someone to ask in a way that feels real.

This was also published on Juliet Funt's LinkedIn.

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