Apr 9, 2015 | Blog

Why Marketo Scrapped the Annual Survey—And You Should, Too

Develop Your Workforce

Marketing automation trailblazer Marketo is known around Silicon Valley as one of the tech industry’s hottest companies. With 3,300 clients worldwide, the company has been growing rapidly for several years – boasting employees from its headquarters in San Mateo, California, to Atlanta, Dublin, Tokyo, Sydney, and the UK.

In 2014, as Marketo entered another year that promised a significant workforce increase, the company realized it needed to focus on helping employees thrive as things rapidly changed. To do that, they’d have to double down on measuring and monitoring employee engagement. The company’s traditional method of measuring engagement—the annual survey—wasn’t scalable as the workforce grew, and was ineffective in reducing growing pains. As one executive put it, “the annual survey just didn’t work for us.”

For companies like Marketo, the annual survey is more of an eye-roller than a game-changer. Three reasons annual surveys don’t work for rapidly growing organizations:

  1. They don’t report engagement in real time. Annual surveys aren’t executed often enough to keep up with fast-growing companies. In an organization like Marketo, where teams are growing and reorganizing on a near-constant basis, surveying the workforce annually provides a snapshot in time and little else. The workforce of next year—or next month—could look drastically different, making survey results irrelevant soon after they’re delivered.
  2. Insights are sweeping, rather than localized. Not only do annual survey results arrive too late, but results tend to be generalized, ignoring local and demographic disparities while providing a diagnosis for the company as a whole. For Marketo, a company with employees spanning four continents, not to mention countless job functions and a variety of motivations, localizing survey results to reflect its many different demographics was a essential.
  3. They disregard managers as integral to engagement. Managers are the strongest touch point to keeping employees engaged and thriving, so it’s important to provide them with distinctive data about how their teams are doing. With the annual survey, managers often don’t receive insights into what’s challenging their teams specifically, and are therefore disempowered to effect change.

To help employees thrive, Marketo needed something more insightful and real time to measure and monitor employee engagement. The company adopted software that surveys employees quarterly—rather than annually—to keep a pulse on employee engagement, so they can take immediate action and track progress as it’s made. With results specific to teams, locations, and job function, the organization is better equipped to respond to engagement challenges in a meaningful way.

Discover more about Marketo’s growing organization and how they help their people thrive by registering for our upcoming webcast, “How Abandoning the Annual Engagement Survey Helps Fuel Marketo’s Rapid Growth,” today.