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…

As the nation continues to struggle with a major economic downturn, we continue to look at its ever-growing impact on the workplace.  Because we believe honest communication is one of the hallmarks of great workplaces, we thought it might be a good time to revisit the results of a survey conducted by the Corporate Executive Board last year.  Michael Griffin, its author and Executive Director of the CEB, in his article entitled “Open-Door Policy, Closed-Lip Reality” reveals two disheartening survey conclusions:

1. Nearly half of executive teams fail to receive negative news that is material to firm performance in a timely manner because employees are afraid of being tainted by the bad news.
2. Only 19% of executive teams are always promptly informed of bad news that is material to firm performance.

“Unfiltered, honest feedback becomes increasingly scarce as it moves from the bottom to the top of the organization”, concludes Griffin.  The CEB survey of more than 300,000 employees reveals that “companies that break down two key barriers to honest feedback can deliver peer-beating shareholder returns by a substantial margin.”  They identified two factors which stood out when it came to increasing 10-year TSR (long-term total shareholder return) from 1998-2008:

1. Openness of Communication—Employee perceptions of the extent to which managers encourage two-way dialogue matters.  The CEB found that “…companies rated by their employees in the top quartile in terms of openness of communication have delivered TSR (10-year TSR 1998–2008) of 7.9% compared with 2.1% at other companies.  They also had materially lower levels of observed fraud and misconduct.”
2. Fear of Retaliation (and Willingness to Speak Up)—The CEB tracks 12 key indicators in their cultural diagnostic.  The one that is most strongly correlated with 10-year TSR is employee comfort in speaking up.  “The most important driver of this comfort is a lack of fear of retaliation.  As with openness of communication, we found that companies that excel on this dimension also had materially lower levels of observed fraud and misconduct.”

The CEB has also found that fear is a particularly powerful inhibitor.  In another recent survey of 100 clients, the CEB asked them to ‘estimate the amount of harm that would have to be present to share honest (negative) feedback at risk to their careers’.  Their conclusions?

• Fifty-nine percent estimated that more than $1 million worth of harm to the company would have to be at stake for employees to share honest (negative) feedback.

• Twenty-nine percent estimated that more than $10 million would have to be at stake.

Our conclusion is that there is a lot of room in these numbers for employees to think it might just be better to ‘keep some thoughts to themselves’.  When corporate performance may be negatively impacted (or could be seriously improved), both management and contributors ‘lose’…

We believe a free-flow of communication is now important more than ever to achieve corporate goals, encourage innovation, maintain team engagement and retain great employees.  When was the last time you reviewed your own ‘open-door policy’?  How well is it working?  How do you plan to find out?

If you’ve been focusing on getting more work done with fewer employees over the past few months, you may only now find yourself thinking about the impact our economic recession may be having on those employees who have been shouldering the load.  You’re not alone.

In his recent ‘Losing Lifeblood’ article in Workforce Management[1], Garry Kranz outlines several recent surveys with engagement results we found troubling.  Note that survey results indicate that middle managers and executives are also feeling less and less engaged:

BlessingWhite, Inc., NJ – January, 2011

• In North America, only 33% of employees identified themselves as engaged.

• 1% of engaged employees say there is ‘no way’ they will stay with their organizations during the next 12 months.

• 18%  say they ‘probably’ will stay.

LeadershipIQ, Washington DC – June, 2011 (Results based on 102,311 responses from employees and managers in 130 organizations, primarily in the U.S.)

• 69% of North American workers said they are either disengaged or ‘underengaged’

• More than half of frontline supervisors report being either disengaged (8%) or ‘underengaged’ (44%)

• Fully one-third of middle managers and 30% of executives voiced similar sentiments

Kenexa Research Institute, Minn – Preliminary 2011 Report (Global Survey of nearly 30,000 employees)

• Employee engagement index score for U.S. workers – 58%

• Employee engagement index score for global workers – 53%

(See “The Last Word Cultural Awareness.”)

Jack Wiley, the Institute’s executive director, says that employees began to despair as a worsening economy triggered more and more layoffs.  However, he also says there may be light at the end of this tunnel—at least for some organizations.

According to Wiley, some employers say they have managed to sustain engagement levels during the prolonged recession.  How?  They made it a priority to systematically gather feedback from employees, analyze responses and implement changes as needed—“They measure engagement with the same rigor they apply to customer service or financial data.”

We think that’s the appropriate start.  Ultimately, we also know that employee engagement also involves career advancement and compensation—not necessarily in that order.  However, if you’ve asked your employees about their aspirations and priorities in the past—and followed through on some of their suggestions, all you need to do is make it a priority to ask again.  They will let you know what’s really on their minds.

On the other hand, if this will be your first employee engagement survey, welcome!  You’re embarking on an interesting and, what could possibly be, a very productive time…

Now, there’s a thought…  In a survey of 468 job-seekers conducted by Monster.com and employee benefits provider Unum, the top-rated item on would-be employees’ wish lists was a company ‘that truly cares about the well-being of its employees’.  Eight-seven percent of those surveyed rated that quality ‘very important’ in their job hunt—and the result was nearly identical for both the employed and unemployed respondents.

Other ‘very important’ priorities for people seeking employment were:

• A challenging and fulfilling position –  84%

• Job security – 82%

• Benefits package – 74%

Coming in lower in the rankings were questions of dollars and cents:  A high base salary was very important to 66 percent, and bonuses were very important to a little more than half of those surveyed.

The survey, which also polled human resources leaders, showed a strong connection between caring for the well-being of employees and financial protection beyond the paycheck:

• 86 percent of HR leaders indicated that making sure employees and their families are taken care of should something happen to them is an important reason for providing financial protection benefits.

• 82 percent of workers agreed that being offered financial protection benefits shows that a company cares about the well-being of its employees.

“Employees, job-seekers and human resources leaders understand the importance of a caring corporate culture in recruiting and keeping a talented workforce,” said Mike Simonds, senior vice president for Unum.  “Benefits play an important role in supporting that culture.”

The research is consistent with findings of a recent survey of nearly 400 human resources decision-makers commissioned by Unum in partnership with Harvard Business Review Analytic Services.

That study found that the role of corporate culture is perceived as critical to driving engagement, recruitment and retention of a quality workforce:

An attractive benefits package and an ethical, transparent culture were more likely to be viewed as very important in attracting and retaining staff than were a high starting salary and job security.

Being a company that cares about the well-being of its staff was twice as likely to be viewed as very important in attracting and retaining staff as providing a high base salary.

“An engaged workforce is crucial to any company’s success, especially at a time when businesses are striving to recover from the economic crisis,” Simonds said.  “A supportive corporate culture and benefits that help protect the financial stability of employees help build that engagement.”

How do you think your employees would respond?  When was the last time you asked them?

About the survey

Monster.com completed research with 196 employed workers and 272 unemployed workers, all of whom were seeking new employment opportunities through its online employment services.  In addition, Monster.com interviewed 190 HR decision makers from a diverse set of industries and company sizes again drawn from among customers of its website services.

Surveys were fielded and completed in October 2010.  Nineteen percent of jobseekers were under the age of 35, while 52% were between 35 and 54, and another 29% were age 55 or older.  Almost half of fulltime workers (45%) and unemployed workers (44%) reported their current or most recent annual job income as being greater than $50,000.  Among HR executives included in the research, 21% represented large companies with 2,000 or more employees, while 39% worked for small businesses with fewer than 100 employees.  Another 40% were at medium?size companies with between 100 and 1,999 employees.