Profanity! Should you remove it from open question responses in your employee engagement surveys?

It would be fair to say that swearing is more common now than ever and certain words are almost normal vernacular.  Within our employee engagement surveys, which contain a number of open questions; we see a variety of swear words and are often asked by clients to ‘redact’ these before they publish results – but should they be redacted?

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal showed that swearing in reviews can actually be effective at getting your point across.  Over 275,000 reviews were analysed and the findings were quite stark, typically those containing swear words were deemed more valuable than those without when rated by users as “helpful” or “unhelpful” – in short, swearing (to a point) can be an excellent way of getting your point across.

When we think about comments in employee engagement surveys, I feel the same applies.  When reading comments, you can see that people use swearing, often to emphasise a point or to convey real depth of feeling.  So, rightly or wrongly, these are the comments made by the individual and who are we to change them?

There is, clearly, a discussion to be had around the strength of some of those words and how others might react.  There are swear words that many would find offensive or upsetting and/ or problematic but that then begs to the question, do you redact only some words and, if so, on what basis?  What one person finds offensive, another may not?

A tricky minefield for sure – consideration should be given before thinking about making redactions, as is always the case but when it comes to swearing….maybe redactions should no longer take place?

If you would like to find out more about how The Survey Initiative can help your organisation improve employee engagement call us on +44 (0)1255 850051 or email: info@surveyinitiative.co.uk