This is the time of year many organizations take a ‘time out’ to breathe and assess… Often, more thoughtful leadership teams choose this time to engage their employees in this process. In our experience, successful leaders use the information they are given through employee engagement surveys to regularly measure progress as they continue to improve and strive to be employers of choice.
Some suggestions for an effective employee survey process…
Setting up your Survey…
1. First, make some decisions about what you’d like to learn about what your employees think and feel about your organization: How their work is organized? The quality of their supervision? Teamwork within the organization? The company’s culture and values? Confidence in the future? There are many different ways of looking at and organizing your survey. It’s best to strike a balance between including enough questions to ensure good quality and actionable results vs having so many questions that employees simply don’t finish the survey.
2. Year-to-year comparisons? Do you intend to compare results from year-to-year? If so, you probably want to create a set of core questions that cover key areas which won’t change from year-to-year. Even a slight change in wording can make interpretation difficult.
3. Scales? Do you want to use 1-5? 1-6? 1-10? There are advantages and disadvantages to each. Remember that if you do year-to-year comparisons you’ll need to stay with what you start with.
4. Open-ended comments? These can be incredibly helpful in providing both a general feel or tone—and specific examples can add color and make the numbers come to life. They can also be time-consuming to manage because you hopefully want to protect everyone’s anonymity—and that means editing each and every comment for appropriate language.
5. Reassure survey participants that their input will be strictly anonymous—that you will have no way of identifying specific individuals in this process. Consider the use of a third party survey team to set apart your employee engagement surveys from internal ‘spot’ surveys with regard to products and services, for example.
Managing Your Survey Results…
1. Publish the results. We recommend that you publish bar or chart results at a ‘top’ level on an internal website. Transparency is important today—it also lets your teams know that you are committed to listening to them and doing something with the results.
2. Provide periodic feedback against organizational goals so employees can track progress. Email updates, newsletters, and in-person meetings can all work well in this regard.
3. Provide opportunities for continued employee involvement and feedback—such as a place to send comments.
4. Provide customized feedback to specific populations—such as first level managers, mid-level managers and those involved with active initiatives.
5. Include a comparison level or a bench mark. Graphics can sometimes be the best way to communicate a lot quickly.
6. Make sure measurements are easy to use and understand.
The engagement survey process takes time and commitment on the part of leadership teams. We feel it’s well worth the effort to better tap into the insight of your teams—and prepare for a successful year ahead…
