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How to get the most from employee engagement surveys


Employee engagement surveys are rapidly becoming an invaluable human resources tool, especially at a time when recruitment and retention pose major challenges. Jaime Johnson, director of The Survey Initiative, looks at how to get a good response and make the most of the findings from an engagement survey


T


he recommended approach to using employee engagement surveys is to start with a fact- finding ‘deep dive’ survey, followed by briefer,


regular ‘pulse’ surveys, which help you to monitor and track progress, every six to 12 months. The success of any survey lies in gaining plentiful data to analyse, but it can be a challenge to persuade a geographically widespread workforce with a variety of roles to participate in an employee engagement survey. Here are some key steps you can take to ensure good responses and promote constructive follow up:


Step one: position your survey in advance


It is essential to communicate to your entire organisation that you will be taking note of their opinions and using the results of the survey to help make progress. We intentionally spend time helping employers to communicate to employees that positive changes will be made in response to the findings of the upcoming survey. Employee engagement surveys can easily achieve less than a 40% response rate, but if the survey is carefully explained in advance, we regularly see response rates in excess of 80% across a good cross section of an organisation.


Step two: talk to the people you will be surveying


Employers often have a general idea of how people might feel about some issues but cannot quantify them. A discussion with a small focus group, or a brief chat with some key people in particular roles, can help craft the best questions for the survey. Analysis of the responses to these will provide that missing quantitative data. Pre-survey discussions should be carefully targeted. Rather than asking an area supervisor what their heating engineers think, ask some engineers.


Step three: draft individual questions carefully


The initial deep dive survey is more far reaching, while a pulse survey is quite brief. In each, it is


Left:Jaime Johnson, director of The Survey Initiative


important to word every question carefully and make it applicable to as broad a cross section of the organisation as possible. The more relevant the question, the greater the response rate and more informative the data collected will be. In some organisations, you may need to run a separate pulse survey for some teams or to cover particular topics. You can now enter into contracts for research as a service, so you can run multiple small surveys each year, allowing you to track particular teams or issues and to react quickly to the findings where necessary.


Step four: make sure people know their answers are confidential


People will give more frank and honest answers when confident that what they write will not be held against them. This is particularly important in open questions which allow respondents free expression. This makes it essential to use an outsourced expert who will provide a portal for employees to login and complete the survey in confidence on computers, tablets or phones, whichever suits them best. If you have potential respondents without smart technology, the analyst can also transcribe and include paper survey responses, again, in confidence.


Step five: share and act on the results


We always advise prospective clients that if you are not going to act on the results, you should not run a survey. Asking for employees’ opinions and not acting on the findings will inevitably result in less, rather than more, engagement. Not reporting the findings back to the team can also send a negative message


about how little you value them. When you publish the findings of the survey and introduce positive changes as a result, engagement definitely rises. Even better than sharing and acting on the results, we recommend empowering your people to plan and implement the changes recommended. This promotes ownership and increases engagement.


Monitoring engagement is particularly important in


troubled times. Recruiting and training new employees is a serious cost to most organisations, just as a constant churn of people can have serious implications for business continuity. When staff retention is a prime objective, consulting and listening to your people can be a powerful commercial secret weapon.


14 December 2022


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