How to improve employee engagement through your research and close experience GAPS

Many organisations are still gathering knowledge about future office, home and hybrid working and how those can support different employee groups, functions and continue to provide flexibility.

With 22 months of change behind us there are different influences on employee experiences, some of which have a greater impact on employees than we all previously understood, for example, different requirements around line management support.

The workplace may feel like quite a different environment since your last Employee survey, however, methods, and best practices for running successful employee research still stand.?

Engage your people throughout the research process, make it their initiative and let them own some of it.

Our significant advisory knowledge and experiences from undertaking a number of employee engagement, experience and development initiatives enables us to recommend the following best practices are always applied to any employee research initiative.

Engage your people in the process, they are your best resource:

• Ask for their input on promoting the survey
• Gather ideas on achieving high levels of response
• Ask for their contribution to the research
• Keep your people informed

Embrace your initial research design and ensure it is sufficiently agile to reflect changes as your employee experiences evolve.?

Question development must reflect how you deliver experiences and what employees feel, hear, see, and do. Understand their emotional connections with your organisation and what they would like those connections to look and feel like.

• Confirm with your people the the questions asked are understood and ensure they are not ambiguous
• Don’t forget your trends, keep those aligned where possible (compare apples with apples).
• We often help clients tailor their research to their working environment, aligning with their rhythms, routines and process.
• Design research that identifies the ideal experiences in sector and how employees feel about their current experiences.

Maru/ behavioural science based, Feel, Behave, Think methodology?enables understanding of employee emotion. Employees who are on the same emotional plane allows for improved communication and?sustainable employee experience.?

We encourage organizations to step away from large surveys, where indicators move very little, or in the wrong direction yet challenges still exist.?

Applying Maru/ behavioural science-based methodologies enables understanding of how your people feel, think and behave. We use gamified visual semiotics making survey completion quick, easy to understand and fun.

Your KPI and tracking questions still apply and we overlay our techniques to understand what the numbers really mean.

Communication before during and after the research process will drive positive outcomes, your people are a great resource to help.?

• Ask your staff how they would like to be communicated with?
• As one, in groups, in townhalls, via intranet or individually.
• This ask is engaging and creates value from opinion.

Experience shows nominating champions across organisations to act as go to advisors and local communicators, has great benefit. This socialises the survey and makes it business wide rather than an HR initiative.

Maru/HUB provides a central point for all research types, including?coordinating research, managing response rates, seeing live results feeds and being able to coordinate communication.

Maru/HUB technology makes it easier to conduct targeted surveys more frequently and present the findings quickly to leadership, managers, and staff online.

This approach enables organisation to be agile in responding to employees’ needs. It also supports the Ecosystem of employee research, feedback, action and development

Our research shows that undertaking surveys amongst employees and asking for their input without acting on the results will lead to lower response rates and disengagement.

When considering the frequency of your employee survey, the following should be considered to ensure the pace is manageable:

• What kind of process is required to manage and reset expectations of leaders and employees?
• What have past actions created that employees will reflect on?
• Is there enough time to take action before your listening cycle starts again?
• How will more frequent measurement overlap with your business rhythms and routines?
• There is no single approach that will work for all; only to make sure your measures, and review process reflects your organisations process.

There are some must do’s in this process:?

• Engage all staff in the process, every employee must be invited to take part, including staff on maternity or sick leave
• Collect findings that enable analysis at manager, business function, and team level, not forgetting any other segmentation groups that reflect your business structure
• Broad business initiatives have their place, in our experience change will happen quicker when managers and their teams take ownership of findings and develop local actions plans
• Always align the survey data with retention, performance, recommendation metrics, exit interview and learning analytics

Changing, re starting and evolving your employee listening can feel daunting, considering some or all of the points above will guide a successful survey.

We like talking and helping our clients and stakeholders to create successful research and great outcomes, if you have any questions drop over an email to?- [email protected]

Or even better call on - 01489 772920