Over the years I have had many discussions about the worthwhileness of employee surveys and seen lots of comments about the fact they are a waste of time. The first time I was tasked with running an employee survey, there were about 5,000 employees, it was a complicated survey and although run by an external provider you had to get the employee data set right to make sure the departmental results were accurate. Thankfully with that survey the results were calculated and the business received a handy tool to be able to cut and understand the data.
It was a real learning for me, at the time quite new to the world of HR, about perception, that you can’t communicate enough and that employees will hold on to grievances. For example, there used to be a small Christmas bonus, which had been cut about 5 years prior to this survey and there were still comments about it being taken away. No-one is happy with the temperature, their salary or the IT equipment.
I certainly learnt a lot from the survey and I believe that businesses can too.
Surveys are a great way to either find out what is going on in your business, if you don’t know or validate your thoughts if you have any idea of the issues. Employees will always be suspicious as to whether it is truly anonymous, although hopefully they will complete anyway. You can just use them for feedback or calculate an engagement score.
What is engagement?
Engagement is the connection an employee feels with to their job, the organisation and the value of the contribution they make. The questions asked generally focus on areas such as whether they work beyond what is required, take on extra responsibilities, whether they plan to leave, how strong they believe in the goals, objectives and strategy of the organisation, if they are proud to work there and feel valued. The more engaged and connected an employee feels to an organisation the more they will work hard, want to progress, feel valued and buy in to the goals and strategy of the business.
Research suggests that organisations with high levels of engagement are more profitable. Therefore, many businesses use surveys because they want to improve engagement and understand where they can make improvements.
The engagement questions themselves can be used to calculate an overall engagement score and this will give you valuable information. However, to understand what changes are needed you need to understand what is driving the answers to the engagement questions.
Drivers for engagement.
The drivers of engagement questions pinpoint the areas which need work and will help you focus on areas of improvement once you have the survey results. So what components should you be looking at?
· Whether employees feel they are involved in the decisions making process.
· Employers demonstrating concern about an employees health and wellbeing
· Senior manager showing employees that they value them
· Employees feeling they can voice their opinions
· Employees good suggestions are acted on
· Employees have the opportunity to develop their jobs
· Managers listen to employees.
Asking questions on these areas and looking at the overall scores will give a sense of what the culture of the organisation is like. Depending on the number of employees in an organisation the results can often be cut to look at departments, demographic splits, manager and senior manager responses, responses based on length of tenure. This can provide further insights and help target specific groups where engagement maybe lower.
What about after the survey.
Well, you must share the results, let employees know what is going well and what isnt. Let’s be honest they already know. I have always asked employees to get involved in making changes from the survey. Get them involved, it is their feedback and engagement isn’t HR, yes we run the survey but cannot change things, everyone has to play a part. A plan might look like:
· Share the results
· Go to all team meetings and share the departmental feedback
· Ask teams to have an action plan specific to their area.
· Have an overall company action plan from identifying the main themes
· Have an employee group and task them with implementing changes
· Communicate the direct changes you make as a result of feedback.
Your main action plan might include reward and recognition schemes, health and wellbeing, diversity initiatives, a better more transparent pay review process, more visibility of senior leaders. So are they worth yes but only if you actually do something with the feedback.
Have you decided to run a survey but don’t know where to start? Contact me for help by emailing bev@bdhr.co.uk.
