4 Reasons to Conduct an Employee Engagement Survey:

Employee engagement must be a key organization strategy to reduce turnover, improve retention, production, and quality of work. All of these improve your organization’s bottom line.

The pillar of any company is their human talent. Buildings stood empty during the pandemic while a mobile workforce continued to bring in customers, reach new markets, and perform under incredibly challenging circumstances. If it wasn’t clear before, it should be now. Human talent, your organization’s collaborators, are the heart and soul of the workforce.

The best way to tap into your collaborators’ needs, wants, and challenges is by conducting an employee engagement survey. Why?

1. Measure employee engagement. A quality survey measures engagement in a non-biased way. What does this mean, exactly? A survey with benchmark data provides significant information regarding key drivers of engagement and disengagement in your organization (even within specific departments, geographical regions and more within the organization). This gives you a bird’s eye view as to what is working and what isn’t and where. More importantly, it gives you information you need to improve engagement through actions.

2. Feedback. An engagement survey provides employees with a place to give candid feedback and feel safe doing so. The fact an organization is conducting a survey sends a positive message that the organization cares about what their collaborators think. Likewise, an employee survey gives directors and senior leaders time to read and consider the information they’ve been given, meet about it, and respond in a timely way. No one is put against the wall, so to speak.

3. Opportunity for follow-up and discussion. If the survey doesn’t have follow-up and group discussions to create action plans regarding the survey, your organization will be worse off. No survey is better than a survey that doesn’t have a good communication plan and resources to put toward actions. Within a couple of weeks of conducting the survey, thank your employees for their time and candor, acknowledge that there may be work to be done, and establish a timeline for when results will be socialized and groups will meet to develop and implement action plans. The more involved your collaborators, the more positive the outcome. Buy-in to actions is a key piece of engagement.

4. Change (improve) your organization culture. The only way to tap into your collaborators’ needs and motivations is by asking. And the only way to change your organization culture is by proactively identifying and addressing problems in the organization. An engagement survey gives you the keys to do this.

Engagement surveys can be a roadmap to your organization’s success. Work with an independent, third-party survey company to guide HR on the best way to develop a communication plan, understand survey results, and build a stronger organization through meaningful action plans that align employees with the organization’s goals. Engagement requires constant effort, mindful actions, and an organization culture that builds meaningful relationships with their collaborators.

“Everyone talks about building a relationship with your customer. I think you build one with your employees first.” ~ Angela Ahrendts