Responding to Employee Engagement Survey Results: A 7 Step-Guide on what comes after!!

Employee Engagement is among the most crucial factors behind organizational success. However, companies are often clueless about how to work towards it. Many believe that conducting an Employee Engagement Survey or an employee satisfaction survey would be enough. However, that’s not true. While it’s important for companies to listen to their employees, listening isn’t enough. Organizations must carefully analyze their survey results and commit towards bringing about meaningful change.

Our surveys team at GreenThumbs have put together some insights on how to turn your employee feedback into positive outcomes. Take a look!

1. Understand Your Results

Go in as deep as you can. You need to know where your organization stands before you can start making changes that move the needle on engagement. This would involve understanding your employee engagement scores thoroughly and visiting these scores multiple times. Understanding results becomes important as it highlights factors that emerge out to be the key drivers of engagement. Find out about -

Lowest scoring employee engagement survey questions: these are the areas where you stand to grow the most.

Highest scoring employee engagement survey questions: These are areas where are doing well already.

Your Overall Employee Engagement Score.

Your Employee Net Promoter Score (Enps), etc

2. Share your results

Employees are often curious to know how their company fared at an employee engagement/satisfaction survey program. Provide them with an overview of how your organisation performed. Companies can share broad themes of engagement – what are the positive areas and what areas need improvement, etc. Sharing results with employees also increases a sense of belongingness among employees, they feel more involved, there by acting as a catalyst for employee engagement itself. It also makes the participants believe that you are not just conducting survey for fun and the company is really interested in the welfare of the employees and bringing about change.

3. Make Concrete goals

Making concrete goals help to develop commitment to the implementation strategy. Make time-based concrete goals targeted towards specific areas that need to addressed (eg. improve the survey item “Senior management communicates the information that I need to know about the organization” result by five percentage points on the next Employee Engagement Survey). Another vital element here is communication, have your managers interact with their teams in defining goals that would lead to further improvement. For long-term goals that could involve major changes, break up larger initiatives into smaller steps for multiple individuals, ensuring all stakeholders are involved and accountable. Conduct small experiments/ pilot initiatives before bringing about a major change.

4. Build a SMART action plan

The purpose of Action Planning is to address the feedback from the survey and construct a timeline to convert information into positive change. The importance of action planning is that employees will judge the value of the survey based on the actions taken from the survey. Action Planning is all about turning feedback into actionable results by Communicating, Developing, Implementing and Measuring. Research indicates that employees who witness positive change from the survey results are twice as likely to be highly engaged versus those who do not. Identify the critical areas that need improvement and create a strategy for next course of action. Action planning should be a participative, inclusive process.

5. Fix Accountability

There’s a need to set expectations, accountability and timelines. The responsibility of looking into employee engagement parameters and implementing an action plan must be assigned to someone. This process should include making managers and senior leaders responsible for setting the pace and direction of action plans, for communicating these to employees and for establishment of concrete timelines. The idea is to create accountability and expectations among managers and involve employees in meeting those expectations.

6. Follow up

Employee Engagement is an ongoing process. Therefore, make sure that you don’t stop at just one Employee Engagement Survey. Follow ups are vital in order to tap the progress made by the company. Regular check-ins, Pulse surveys, running additional feedback surveys (like a 360 degree feedback, etc), are popular ways of following up and carrying out post employee engagement survey interventions.

Employee Engagement Survey: A True Measure of Engagement

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