30 September 2024
The study also found that engaged teams have lower turnover, 21% greater profitability, 17% higher productivity, and 10% higher rates than disengaged teams. Engaged employees clearly contribute more to a business than those who aren’t.
You can’t measure what you don’t know, which is why engagement surveys are used by organisations to gauge the amount of engagement their workforce is exhibiting. However, implementing an engagement survey isn’t the end of it—there’s quite a bit more work to be done if you want to use it to its full potential.
You might be familiar with the statistics above if you’ve done an engagement survey at your workplace. Plenty of businesses have engagement surveys done at the workplace to gain an insight into how employees feel about their work and overall environment.
However, the common problem we’ve seen is that an organisation will launch an engagement survey, but won’t know how to interpret the results or make any further action based on the results. The inevitable consequence is that employees don’t feel heard as they see it as a tokenistic effort by the company. According to the Harvard Business Review, only 25% of employees believe that their company takes highly efficient responses to the feedback they offer.
Let’s say you’ve done the legwork in creating and distributing an employee engagement survey. What do you do next—and how do you ensure you’re leveraging the results you get from it?
First of all, it’s important to look at the response rate the survey got. There might be team members who didn’t respond to it—meaning they aren’t even interested in letting their opinion on the workplace be heard. Having a low response rate is already a cause for concern, and it might be worth sending the survey again. But if you have a high number of respondents, then you’re on the right track!
Now that you have all the data, it’s time to analyse the results. It’s easier said than done, especially when you have a lot of data to sift through.
One thing we advise is to segment the respondents into groups. Everyone’s experience is different. Segmenting your data by staff groups and demographics can help you get an insight into the issues that these groups are facing. For example, one survey could have results saying 68% of a company’s workforce thought they were recognised for contributing to the company’s successes. However, upon segmenting the respondents, it could uncover that only a certain demographic feel this way, and other employees don’t feel recognised for their contributions.
It’s also important to contextualise your data. Was the survey sent out a time where changes were happening across the organisation, like layoffs or bonuses getting cut? Context is important, and should be taken into consideration when looking at the results of employee engagement surveys.
A step that’s easily missed in this process is communicating the survey results to the team. It’s crucial to show the importance of the survey to your employees and assure them it’s not a set-and-forget process that you do just to tick a box off. Some organisations think that an engagement survey’s results are purely for the management team, but this can’t be farther from the truth. However, we’re not saying that all results should be shared with the entire workforce. Deciding on what you share and how transparent you’ll be when it comes to the results depends on your organisation.
Best practice is to communicate and share survey results with team leaders and the management team. After management has reviewed the survey results with HR, identified areas for improvement, and explored potential actions, the next step is to share the findings with the rest of the company.”
In telling your team about the results, it’s also important to let them know what steps you’ll be taking based on the results of the survey. That leads us on to our last step.
Don’t let the hard work and effort that went into your engagement survey go to waste by letting results gather dust. Now that you have the results, and have discussed them with your management team and HR, it’s time to address them.
Setting goals that are both measurable and actionable builds trust for your employees—especially now that they’re aware that these goals are rooted in the feedback they’ve given in the engagement survey.
It’s also important to remember that the results might show that there’s a lot of areas of improvement in your workplace. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by this, but a good rule of thumb is to choose the areas you want to focus on, and start small. If there are any large goals that the survey uncovered, try to break those large goals into smaller ones that are more easily achievable.
To sum it all up, employee engagement surveys are important tools that give leaders an insight into their workplaces while also helping them drive change. An engagement survey’s true value isn’t just in gathering feedback. It helps management identify areas of improvement, and also increases employees’ trust in the leadership team.
At Now Actually, we know that no two businesses are the same, regardless of the industry they’re in. Your business has its unique culture, challenges, and needs that no other business has. Steer away from one-size-fits-all surveys and explore how we can help you create ones tailored for your business—as well as using these results to improve or maintain employee engagement. Contact our team now.
