Strategic HR Technology Investment: A Comprehensive Checklist for Global HR Teams
“When people are financially invested, they want a return. When people are emotionally invested, they want to contribute.” – Simon Sinek (Author, Start With Why).
In the era of digital transformation, changing technical landscape, and increasing competition, how do organizations keep their employees productive and aligned with organizational goals? The answer to the question lies in finding the organizational activities that contribute towards employee engagement. One of the ways that organizations use to understand the concerns and expectations of their workforce is through employee engagement surveys.
Through the decades, HR managers have used employee engagement surveys as a core strategy to comprehend staff engagement levels, initiate behavior change, and drive higher output. Not only do the surveys help organizations to create an impact on human resource management, but they also provide employees with a medium to share their experiences and views on the practices being followed. Furthermore, with the data revolution and digitization, surveys have become more effective and process-oriented.
There has been a significant improvement in the engagement of US employees over the last decade, with an overall 36% of employees engaged in their work. (Gallup – Employee Engagement Report, 20211)
As the world is still reeling under the stress of the COVID-19 pandemic, various aspects of employee engagement and productivity have changed in the last two years. Some progressive and innovative organizations have been making sincere efforts to keep their dispersed employees engaged and committed to the organization. Engagement surveys come in handy in such scenarios. They help in gauging employee engagement on different parameters and offer insights for leaders to take action.
Before we dive deeper into the intricacies of employee engagement surveys, let’s take a closer look at what employee engagement means to the organization and how engagement surveys provide actionable insights to leaders.
Employee engagement talks about the level of dedication, enthusiasm, and zeal that employees exhibit toward their jobs. Engaged employees are a real asset to the organization as they help in achieving organizational goals through exemplary performance. That’s the reason the majority of Fortune 500 organizations put great emphasis on employee engagement initiatives. Research has shown that some of the activities that help elevate employee engagement are reward and recognition, learning and development, diversity and inclusion, ownership, and employee experience.
By creating a workforce of engaged employees, organizations can become highly competitive and transform themselves into market leaders. Higher engagement is also linked to increased productivity, reduced turnover, effective leadership, higher ROI, and overall happiness of the workforce. Therefore, by working towards the engagement of employees, organizations can reap multiple benefits and can create a workforce of dynamic employees that is performance-driven and result-oriented.
Employee engagement surveys are a strategic technique that helps in measuring the motivation, commitment, and purpose of employees towards their job responsibilities and, thereby, towards the organization. The survey reveals important information regarding employee perceptions towards the organization. Such insights help leaders and managers make a shift in the workplace to enhance the overall employee experience.
Carefully designed surveys can help organizations understand how their employees feel about work, leadership, any barriers to engagement and higher productivity, the causes of low employee morale, and much more. Responsiveness of the organization towards employee feedback can help drive major changes in the organization. It leads to lower absenteeism, higher retention, better customer centricity, customer acquisition, higher revenue generation, and a satisfied workforce.
An organization undertakes an employee engagement survey to understand what factors lead to an engaged workforce and the hindrances to the process. Companies that are heavily invested in their employees are able to retain their best performers and build a brand that attracts job seekers. Let us try to understand the importance of conducting surveys and employee engagement in an organization through some statistics.
Recent shifts in the global economy have put organizations at the forefront of employee engagement. To remain competitive in the current capricious circumstances, organizations need a highly engaged and productive workforce that can bring in results. Because of this, employee engagement surveys have gained prominence due to their ease of delivery, quick response time, qualitative and quantitative data, and feedback analysis.
It has been found in multiple studies that employees that actively respond to employee engagement surveys are enthusiastic about their jobs and want to share the feedback for the betterment of the organization. On the contrary, employees that do not respond to surveys are not engaged in their jobs. While there are multiple reasons for employees to not fill out the engagement questionnaire, some of the most prominent ones can be:
An employee engagement survey serves multiple purposes for the organization in the following ways:
Psychologists have found that asking questions can prompt people to change their behavior. It is based on the fact that questions help people reflect on themselves. It helps with staying committed to a cause and changing personal traits and characteristics for future goals.
Coined as a “question-behavior effect,” the phenomenon was first published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology10. It states that asking questions about the future behavior of a person can speed up their process of being ready to change.
The same concept is used in employee engagement surveys. Questions prompt employees to understand their current behavior and the changes required to achieve their goals. The crux of the survey lies in initiating the behavior change process among employees.
Interacting with employees and taking their feedback sends a signal that their opinions matter to the organization. Sending out regular surveys and acting on them makes the workforce more engaged and dedicated towards their work. Let us look at the importance of hearing from employees using the below statistics.
The Workforce Institute at UKG and Workplace Intelligence11 conducted a global study on 4,000 employees to uncover some tangible insights related to employee performance and embracing feedback.
The above statistics highlight the importance of hearing out the employees and taking appropriate action on that. Through employee engagement surveys, organizations can break the shackles and prompt their employees to share realistic feedback.
Employee behavior is central to the success of an organization. Much of how employees behave in their day-to-day lives predicts the culture of the company and ultimately drives results. Predicting employee behavior can result in multiple benefits for human resource managers. It helps in understanding the level of commitment of employees towards the organization and how long they are willing to serve them.
It has been observed that asking people in employee engagement surveys how long they are willing to serve the organization is twice as accurate in forecasting future turnover as a predictive analysis. Additionally, surveys also help in predicting the number of upcoming resignations. It has been found that employees who do not respond to annual engagement surveys are highly likely to leave in the next six months.
Employee engagement is critical to the success of an organization. By undertaking various engagement initiatives, organizations can improve their overall performance and create a dynamic workforce. Much research has shown that engagement is an indicator of progress, and companies with higher engagement indices do well, even in unprecedented situations.
Employee Engagement Surveys are a great tool to measure engagement at various levels of the organization. Let us look at some of its benefits.
Engagement is the result of multiple activities that an organization undertakes. The product of these activities vary across countries and industries. Consequently, organizations that are expanding to different geographies need to understand what engages their employees the most.
Knowing where the organization falls on the engagement spectrum provides a bigger picture of the organization’s policies and practices. With the help of employee engagement surveys, upper management can compare the organization with the industry leaders and focus their efforts on improving engagement.
Frequent surveying provides a glimpse of changing trends in employee engagement and experience. Thus, HR managers can understand which strategies are helping out the organization and which obstacles need to be removed.
An estimate by Gallup states that the US companies lose between $450-$500 billion12 due to actively disengaged employees. This is on top of the revenue loss due to the pandemic and the shift in the external business environment.
The statistics clearly indicate the importance of adopting employee engagement initiatives at all levels of the organization. The higher the level of employee disengagement, the higher the chances of making costly and catastrophic mistakes. Therefore, to prevent losing out on revenue, it is critical to hear employee feedback and take appropriate action to boost employee engagement in both the short and long term.
Depression and anxiety are the leading causes of loss of productivity and employee engagement. It has a tremendous impact on the world economy; the world stands out on losing over $1 trillion every year due to a loss of employee productivity. (World Health Organization13)
Another survey14 by SHRM found that of 1,099 surveyed employees, around 40% felt exhausted, burned out, and despondent due to the alteration in their lives caused by the pandemic.
There is no doubt that the pandemic has taken a toll on the mental health of employees. Aggravated by the long working hours and stress of family and child healthcare, things have gotten even worse. Employee wellbeing has become a priority for employers, and organizations globally are investing heavily to counter the effects of the pandemic on the mental health of their employees.
But, how do organizations identify that their employees are stressed and in need of support? Employee engagement surveys offer insightful data to understand the employee’s wellbeing and the peculiar areas that are a cause of concern for them. Furthermore, employers can also focus on the departments or business units with highly disengaged employees and focus on their improvement to prevent breakdown.
The information collected in engagement surveys can be used to analyze the employee turnover data. By comparing the responses of employees with the turnover data, HR managers can comprehend the areas of employee experience that need improvement in order to contain attrition.
The process involves comparing the responses of employees who left the organization within 3–6 months of conducting the engagement survey. It reveals how employees felt about the organization and their overall experience before leaving. Furthermore, the perceptions of such employees can then be compared with the ones who stayed to gauge the reasons for employee turnover. Managers can then intervene in the areas that need improvement and strategize a plan to increase engagement and enhance the overall experience.
Leaders throughout the world believe engagement to be one of the five most important strategies in creating a revolutionary organization. But the biggest challenge they are trying to solve is tying employee engagement initiatives to key business results. Having an engagement survey is not enough if it cannot produce the desired results. Therefore, to get the most out of the surveys, human resource managers need to develop them in accordance with the key business indicators, such as customer centricity, overall stakeholder value, company reputation, and brand building.
Such an amalgamation of business outcomes with employee engagement surveys helps in strategizing the operations across different departments. Furthermore, it can bring important insights that help in charting out how organizations utilize their employees in unprecedented situations, such as the sudden change in the business environment, regulatory compliance, new competitors, and changing customer expectations.
Creating an employee engagement survey is a tedious task. It requires months of planning to address the areas that the survey should touch upon, and the involvement of employees from every level of the organization. To yield actionable results from surveys, HR managers should consider forming a cross-functional team of experts to look into different aspects of survey creation. The following points highlight the extensive process of creating employee engagement surveys.
Employee engagement encompasses various factors, and working on all of them in one go is not possible. Though it can be tempting to include multiple focus areas in the survey, it might confuse the employees and digress from the current state of the company. Thereby a result, providing inaccurate results.
At the time of discerning, it is crucial to identify three or four high priority objectives, especially where engagement and productivity are lacking. For example, if customer acquisition and retention, employee turnover, and decreasing sales volume are the areas of concern, then the survey should only focus on these factors.
For the survey to produce any results, the involvement of leadership is a must. The dynamics of leader-employee relationships are not one-directional, and that’s why involving leaders in employee engagement exercises can give direction and purpose to the process.
In the initial phase of survey planning, human resources managers must reach out to organizational leaders to get their input on the objectives of the survey. This also ensures they have a vested interest in taking action on the survey results.
While designing an employee engagement survey, HR managers can refer to the previous surveys to inculcate best practices and improvise on the ones that did not work well. It can offer meaningful insights, such as which survey designs were liked by employees, the response rate, accuracy of results, core focus areas covered, actions taken on the feedback, timeframe adopted for the whole process, and the overall engagement score. Such action points will help in designing the survey to bring in better results from employees.
The timing of the survey is of great importance in order to get a higher response rate and data accuracy. HR managers should consider the following do’s and don’ts when deciding on the timing of the survey.
The frequency of conducting a survey is of the utmost importance. Some organizations conduct surveys annually and then wait for a year to collect input from their employees. Much has already happened in the gap, and if their surveys are not accompanied by action, then it might result in disgruntled employees.
Therefore, human resource managers must conduct engagement surveys regularly in order to send a message that employees’ inputs are being valued.
Drafting good survey questions is time-consuming. It generally requires collaboration from multilevel, cross-functional teams to understand whether the surveys target the organization’s key objectives or not. The questionnaire must cover all the aspects that are relevant to the purpose of the engagement survey. The quality of questions has a statistically significant effect on the survey findings; hence, one must take the utmost interest and care while designing them.
The questions must be drafted in a manner that elicits an accurate response from the employees. Open-ended employee engagement questions must be included in the survey questionnaire. It helps employees voice their opinions and ideas. Furthermore, managers can analyze the collected responses and can dig into the areas that they would’ve never considered looking into.
Testing the questionnaire is also important to understand the relevance and accuracy of the collected data. Organizations use techniques such as focus groups, cognitive interviews, pretesting, and combinations of these to test the survey. Thereafter, the insights collected from testing are used to refine the questions.
An employee engagement survey template includes questions that measure the motivation and engagement of employees to perform their job duties. Additionally, the responses collected from the survey are useful in understanding the performance, competence, and satisfaction of employees.
A template comes in handy when conducting a survey, as it helps in gathering, organizing, and analyzing the data collected from employees. A good template should be customizable as per the needs of the organization and must highlight the areas that need improvement.
Survey design requires some art, but even more science. Some research estimates that employees are surveyed 1.5 times per year. Given this fact it’s important that we implement sound practices in the design of organization surveys that help inform key business decisions.
When it comes to survey design validity is essential, it determines what survey questions to use, and helps ensure that we are using questions that accurately measure the issues of importance. Validity ensures that we are measuring what we say we are measuring.
The Engagedly Team has spent time and effort constructing an engagement survey that is valid, supported by research, and reviewed by industry experts. Now our clients can confidently assess employee engagement within their organization in a few simple steps. This new product offering provides our clients with an easy-to-administer employee engagement survey built around evidence based practices. Additionally, we provide insights to better understand employee engagement within and across the company while highlighting key strengths and areas for opportunity as well.
Now more than ever we can all benefit from thinking more like a scientist by applying more rigor and critical thinking in the work that we do. At Engagedly that is our responsibility, to marry science and practice, wherever and whenever possible.
Once the engagement survey is created, it is time to get it rolling. There are a few things that managers need to consider before they decide to roll out the survey. Following the best practices for employee engagement surveys will help in getting accurate results. Some of the tactics to be followed are discussed below.
Effective participation in surveys happens only when employees are clear about the purpose of the survey. To encourage employees to participate in the survey, organizations need to clearly communicate the following to their employees:
It is important to keep the employee engagement survey anonymous. The reason behind this is that employees feel less anxious about the survey and are ready to provide open feedback without the fear of any retribution. Additionally, employee anonymity increases the likelihood of getting more responses.
By veiling the employee’s identity, surveys can prompt them to share their candid responses regarding the leadership styles, culture, interpersonal relations, support from managers, and other relevant areas that organizations want to mull over. Thus, it helps in gathering more responses with higher accuracy, leading to a better analysis of the data.
A sense of purpose is essential for an employee to work productively and contribute towards organizational growth. Without this, employers will lose their best talent to their competitors who value their employees more.
Taking action is the most crucial step in conducting a successful employee engagement survey. Employees value their employers more when they see their feedback is taken into consideration. Therefore, sharing key findings of the survey in a timely manner with the employees is important. By involving the workforce in survey findings, employers can make them feel valued and responsible for the solutions.
Please note that acting on survey findings also avoids “survey fatigue.” It refers to a lack of motivation to participate in assessments and can lead to fewer and (or) inaccurate responses. The fundamental reason behind survey fatigue, as found by McKinsey15 after reviewing 20 academic articles, is the perception that employers will not act on the results.
Often, employers do not tend to share the results or communicate with their employees after conducting the survey. This leads to an employee perception that employers do not value their responses.
On the contrary, sharing and acting on survey results leads to better response and participation from employees in future surveys. The below discussed best practices for employee engagement surveys will help in making surveys more effective and impactful.
Designing and conducting surveys takes a long time, and by not following the best practices, there is a good chance that it will not achieve its purpose. Asking questions that are ineffectively designed will lead to low response rates and inaccurate data. Thus, to avoid wasting time, effort, and money, it is pivotal to follow certain guidelines. The following points talk about employee engagement survey best practices that will help in designing and conducting surveys constructively.
Keeping the survey short and simple is an effective way to increase the response rate. The ideal number of questions to be kept in an engagement survey is around 75. And, it should not take more than 20 to 30 minutes for an employee to answer all the questions. Furthermore, try to avoid repetitive questions and confusing language. It may lead to vague responses if the employee is unable to understand the questions.
HR managers should also look into the previous surveys as well, to understand the optimal number of questions that got the highest response from employees.
Grouping the key focus areas may confuse the employees and will result in uninterpretable responses. Avoid using double-barrelled questions regarding pay and benefits, growth and satisfaction, and learning and motivation. Even when the focus areas are closely related, grouping them will not be beneficial.
For example, an employee may find the pay satisfactory but not the benefits, or vice versa. In such a case, the surveyor will not be able to interpret the response, leaving no chance to create an improvement plan.
While building a questionnaire, managers should clearly segregate the categories and create questions around them. This will avoid any sort of confusion among respondents.
Before rolling out the survey to the whole organization, it is crucial to run it through a set of selected people to test its structure, consistency, and accuracy. It will help in redesigning unclear and ambiguous questions and will further refine the survey.
Involving heads of business units and departments in the design and analysis phases offers numerous benefits. They can highlight the areas that seem to be problematic and need to be addressed through surveys. Furthermore, they can help in laying down a strong foundation for examining the survey findings, leading to better analysis and actionable results.
The survey should have a mix of both positive and negative statements. Having plenty of positive statements such as “my manager understands my concerns” or “my team is quite responsive” will make the survey too rosy. Similarly, using too many negative statements will also subdue the intent of asking questions. Therefore, it is better to use neutral statements wherever possible, as they will elicit the best response from respondents.
Management may want to include questions about age, gender, race, and other demographics to look into the trends or concerns of a group. For example, if women of color find the workplace to be responsible for their growth and development, or if employees in their 50s find the workplace more stressful. But such questions may raise one’s eyebrows, as employees might believe that management might use the data to target those specific groups. Thus, it is necessary to avoid or limit such questions in an engagement survey.
Another set of questions to limit is asking nice things about the management and focusing on the things that can be acted upon. Too many questions about management’s efficiency can put off the respondents. Instead, try to understand things from the employees’ perspective.
Questions about the thoughts, traits, and motives of an individual are disputable and will not provide any actionable data. The line of questioning should involve the observable behavior of the employee to understand their involvement and engagement. Thus, avoiding opinion-based questions in the survey will remove distortion from the results.
Another important aspect to work upon is removing personal bias from the survey. The questions should be drafted in a way that prevents any sort of bias from influencing the results. For example, asking questions about productivity and involvement of female employees can skew the purpose of the survey.
Including questions with variable responses will help in establishing the validity of the survey. Such questions provide quantifiable data to understand if the responses collected are in line with reality. For example, a survey can include questions about the leadership of a particular department. The responses collected from the questions can be verified with objective measures like employee retention and overall departmental productivity. These measures will help in verifying the exactness of the collected data.
Another example could be asking questions about customer satisfaction from the client service department. The responses can be verified using metrics like call drops, frequency of calls from the same customer, and feedback submitted by the customer. The correlation of these metrics with the customer satisfaction index is a great measure to verify the survey responses.
The employee engagement survey forms the baseline for creating an action plan and implementing it across the organization. The real job starts after collecting the responses of employees in various key focus areas. Response data has to be thoroughly analyzed and subjected to various tests to check for validity and accuracy. To get the most out of the feedback results, management must follow the following steps to create a strategic action plan.
There are multiple benefits to communicating employee engagement survey results. Firstly, it helps in building trust and shows employees that their responses are being taken into consideration. Secondly, it brings transparency to the system, which eliminates confusion, and thirdly, it creates a channel of communication between management and employees.
Sharing results with business heads helps them prepare to take action and hold discussions within the departments to find the root cause of the problems. Some issues will pertain to departments, and they can find the best solution by looking at the granular level of data.
The survey results usually provide insights about engagement, productivity, satisfaction, and other elements. Weaving them into a story will help employees understand the rationale behind the survey. Therefore, using a suitable medium like a presentation or an infographic, to highlight the results while narrating the importance of each focus area will be more effective.
Analysis of survey results helps in finding the areas of concern and creating an action plan accordingly. Categorizing the results into different segments will help transform the data into actionable items. While some organizations rely on manual segmentation and analysis, some have transitioned to engagement platforms that come with tech-advanced algorithms to accurately analyze and interpret the data.
Such platforms help in providing a deeper understanding of every key focus area. For example, the survey results might show a positive organizational culture, but digging deeper into the data can reveal information about departments that are lacking support. Such an analysis is imperative for large-scale organizations with multiple business units and departments.
Once the survey results are out, it is time to act on them and find solutions to the problems. By running post-survey meetings, organizations can ask people from different departments to brainstorm and come up with the right solutions. The purpose of these meetings is to involve people and give them an open channel to discuss issues and chart out an improvement plan.
Business heads or team leads must ensure that all employees participate in the process and establish a link between the survey results and employees’ perceptions. During the meetings, the problem statement must be clearly defined with the focus areas, and every employee must be given an opportunity to provide their thoughts on it. Through this process, employers can gather first-hand information directly from the employees who are facing trouble.
The data gathered during engagement surveys and post-survey meetings helps in pinning down the problems. Leaders can utilize this information to create organizational-wide goals and cascade them to different business units.
Using Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle16 can help in streamlining the implementation process and providing observable changes and corrective actions to refine the processes. Introduced by Dr. W. Edwards Deming17 in the 1950s, PDCA is an iterative technique that helps improve business processes. It is used in designing and implementing decisions in the following manner:
Plan: It provides the framework for operations and is directly related to the goals and objectives of the survey findings.
Do: Also known as the action stage, the plan is set into motion and the insights are gathered for future evaluation. All the employees related to the focus areas to be worked upon are involved in this process. It may involve training, re-skilling, mentoring, coaching, and other significant activities required to improve staff engagement.
Check: Evaluating the action plan should be done in two steps. Once during the implementation process, as it helps in checking if the goals are correctly aligned, and twice at the end of the implementation to address the success and failure of the activities.
Act: At this stage, the reasons for the failure and success of the program are collected and used as feedback for running the next PDCA cycle.
Employee Engagement Survey Questions form the foundation of measuring engagement in multiple aspects. They should focus on solving organizational problems, get candid responses from employees, and intend to find the strengths and weaknesses of the organization.
Touching the core areas of engagement, such as satisfaction, leadership, culture, work environment, learning and development, organizational mission, and values, is imperative to have an overarching understanding of employee engagement. Let us look at some sample questions on different areas of engagement.
Open-ended questions provide deeper insights by encouraging employees to express their opinions and experiences. With the help of responses, it can become relatively easier to understand the cause of a problem. That’s why including such questions in engagement surveys is helpful. Check out the sample open-ended questions in the section below.
Much of the organization’s efforts in today’s world revolve around creating a dynamic, smart, adaptive, and engaged workforce. Organizations with a high engagement index are leading the way and utilizing various strategies for employee development.
Employee engagement surveys give employees a voice and assist employers in identifying areas for improvement. By considering employee feedback, organizations can dramatically improve their productivity and efficiency.
