It’s one thing to make a state visit to your front-line employees, like the Queen of England inspecting her household staff before a big party. It’s quite another thing to actually get down into the trenches or, if that’s not possible, get unfiltered feedback and suggestions from the people working with your customers.

Employee surveys can be useful, as long as they’re analyzed and acted upon. I cannot tell you how many seemingly connected companies have binders full of surveys and data points sitting on the shelf of the office of the vice president of human resources, untouched and unread, like treasures from King Tut’s tomb on display in a museum.

As the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) said in a 2015 article entitled “Managing Employee Surveys,” while a survey can send a positive message that leaders want to hear from their employees, “if the senior management team is not fully committed and ready to really listen to and, most important, act on what employees are saying, then conducting a survey can falsely raise expectations among employees, leading to an employee relations disaster.”

If you ask for feedback, you cannot shield responses as if they were top secret information. Employees will deeply resent feeling (ah—there’s that word again, “feeling”! It’s all about human emotion!) as if they’ve been used in a cynical exercise. When you ask for ideas, be sure to take action on specific innovations that might work.

If Joe on the loading dock provided a good idea, make sure a high-level manager thanks him personally.

Unhappy Employees Often Have New Ideas

A good way to make a connection and get new insights is to ask for criticism. This can mean surveying employees during times when they might be ready to criticize you! Employers are often reluctant to take the temperature of employee attitudes during downsizings, business slumps, reorganizations, or outsourcing efforts because they assume that employees will unload a pile of complaints, but organizational experts say that such times can provide an ideal opportunity to solicit tough feedback and get new ideas.

Surveys should be your tool of last resort. Gathering feedback from employees through multiple channels including 360-degree feedback, focus groups, personal discussions on a regular basis is always preferable to taking a survey.

I’m not suggesting that you spend your entire day wandering the hallways and cubicles of your company, doing nothing but talking to your employees and hearing their new ideas for how things could work better.

Maybe half the day would be good!