How to present an employee engagement survey report

Employee engagement remains a critical ingredient in determining the success of a company. It is often said, “Culture eats strategy at breakfast.” This means that a company might have a very good strategy but it will perform well if the culture is not aligned with strategy. For a company to be successful in achieving its strategic goals such as revenue growth, customer retention, new product development, and cost containment, it needs the commitment of its people. Employee engagement is one way to assess whether a company’s employees are aligned with the broader goals of the company.

 What is employee engagement?

Engagement is a state of showing a high drive of commitment and motivation by employees to achieve excellent results that will help a company to perform to its truest potential. According to Hewitt Associates, engaged employees stay, say, and strive for the business. Engaged employees have an immense desire to stay in the company and positively contribute towards its success. Engaged employees say positive words related to the company which will help to attract more customers and top talent into the business. Engaged employees strive to see the company succeed. They show commitment to the company by going the extra mile.

 Why measure employee engagement- The HR business case

 As I always indicate in my articles, HR is a business colleague first before being an HR professional. This implies that HR must help the business to achieve its core business. HR must show how people can help the company to make a profit and unlock shareholder value! Employee engagement survey data will help HR to show correlations between HR activities and the entire business value chain. With such data, HR can drive the business’s strategic direction.

Let us look at some important statistics listed below;

 ·        Companies with engaged staff are likely to be more profitable by 21%-Gallup studies

·        Research indicates that work-related stress results in about a 50% increase in voluntary staff turnover. – Harvard Business Revie. Disengaged employees (especially your critical staff) are stressed and henceforth they are likely to leave your business.

·        Absenteeism is higher in organizations that scored 25% on employee engagement

?      Studies have shown that companies with engaged employees are more likely to experience an 18% greater productivity- Anonymous

?      Companies with highly engaged employees are more likely to retain their critical staff and top talent- Anonymous

?      If you cannot measure something, you cannot manage it-Peter Drucker

 How to measure employee engagement

When measuring employee engagement, some factors are known through the research literature, international benchmarks, and practice that determine employee engagement. These factors also result in employees exerting a positive influence in the business and show great willingness to go the extra mile. These factors are twenty-two and can either go beyond twenty-two or fail to get to twenty-two depending on individual consulting firms and researchers. These factors can be split into company-driven factors, mutually shared driven factors, and manager driven factors.  

In this discussion, this article will focus on six of such factors which will be listed below:

1.   Remuneration

2.   Working hours

3.   Manager effectiveness

4.   Style of management

5.   Trust

6.   Job clarity

This article will make use of dummy data and an imaginary company called Zambezi Cola. The results were presented based on the location of employees, function, gender, and business unit.

 Remuneration

Remuneration is one of the factors that are known to drive employee productivity following early studies by HR forefathers such as Abraham Maslow famous for the hierarchy of needs and F.W. Taylor who is famous for the economic man. A good remuneration package will make your employees engaged and with the current economic environment in Zimbabwe, they are ten times more likely to stay and actively contribute to the business.

 Working hours

Research by PWC indicates that 95% of millennials who responded in a study that was conducted considered work/life balance important. 70% of them indicated that work to life balance is very important.

If you wish to retain your top talent especially the young and energetic ones, you should ensure that they have good rest and time with families. If your staff does not have enough work to life balance, you are more likely to pay the cost through fatigue, the decline in productivity, and increased accident costs.

Manager effectiveness

An effective manager follows through to see things done. An effective manager ensures that the team wins. He or she follows up supporting their team in getting things done. An ineffective manager repels talent. Employees who work with an ineffective manager are more likely to be ineffective.

A book entitled, “My boss, the bully” which was written by Regina Tendai is also a good example that shows how a toxic relationship between a manager and a subordinate can lead to employee disengagement and staff turnover. 

Style of management

Research by Sulamuthu and Yusof (2018: 3326) write, “ Employee engagement is visible in the leadership style of an organization where employees are eager to outperform with their best talents and strengths in the organization.” Employees idolize their leaders. With a good leadership style, employees will stay in a company and be more engaged.

An article by Forbes magazine indicates, “Employees don’t leave companies, they leave bad managers.” With the presence of knowledge workers, a poor leadership style is likely to lead to employee disengagement and ultimately staff turnover.

Trust

Lack of trust in a relationship will result in the death of a relationship. Most divorces at the courts are a result of betrayals of trust. A lack of trust amongst staff members, will result in employee stress and ultimately staff turnover.

Job Clarity

Lack of job clarity in a relationship will result in the death of a relationship. In one of the companies that I once worked within dealing with employee engagement, job clarity was a critical issue that determined employee success and engagement in a role.

Plus 40% of the employees indicated that they did not fully understand what was expected from them. This leads to high levels of disengagement and ultimately turnover.

To explain the issue of employee engagement, we are going to make use of dummy data and an inexistent company called Zambezi Cola. Kindly note that this example and data are for illustrative purposes only.

 Response rates

 Response rate by location

The response rate was high thereby increasing the reliability and confidence of the survey. Equally a low response rate will result in a decline in the reliability and confidence of the survey.

Response rate by gender

The response rate was high thereby increasing the reliability and confidence of the survey. Equally a low response rate will result in a decline in the reliability and confidence of the survey.

Response rate: Function 

The response rate was high thereby increasing the reliability and confidence of the survey. Equally a low response rate will result in a decline in the reliability and confidence of the survey.

 Overall Employee engagement level

 The overall employee engagement is at 4.2 or 84%. According to our rating scale, your staff is engaged. You need to keep up with the momentum.

Assuming that the response rate will be regarded as the sample size and that the employee engagement index is regarded as the mean, we are 90% confident the calculations we did are accurate with a standard error of plus or minus 0.7.

 Results for Engineering

Staff composition for Engineering department

Interpreting the Likert scale

To calculate the ratings for one driver, the Likert uses a 5 point rating score with strongly agree to score 5, agree scoring 4, neither agree nor disagree (neutral) scoring 3, disagree scoring 2, and strongly disagree scoring 1.

The ratings will make use of a weighted average of 5 to come up with a final score. 

Key areas of strengths

Employees in the Engineering department rated remuneration highly indicating that they were happy and satisfied with their salary and benefits. They also indicated a high drive and passion to go the extra mile because of their current remuneration.

The survey notes that from information gathered from HR, Zambezi Cola is currently paying in the upper quartile of the market rates. 

Manager effectiveness and job clarity were rated highly at 4.8 and 4.6 respectively. This means that managers follow up on tasks and that jobs were clear.

Key areas of concern

Summary 

The employee engagement index for the engineering department for Zambezi Cola is currently at was at 4.16 out of 5 or 83.2. This is indicating that the team is engaged but some areas require the business’s urgent attention. The company should work on issues to do with trust, working hours, and style of management. Focus group discussions must be held which will help employees and management to open up. Action plans should be made so that such gaps can be closed.

Summary of changes

There was a 24.55% positive movement in the overall employee engagement score. The can company did well in moving from being passively engaged to engaged. The company still has a long way to go in ensuring that it improves its employee engagement levels.

Of particular concern is a style of management that went down by 39.13% from 2.3 in H1 to 1.4 in H2. Management style was generally perceived to be more aggressive. It can be an issue that the company focused more on areas that were yellow and forgot the style of management. The other reason could be that these employee engagement factors are interrelated. One activity will influence the other. For example, the company cut the staff by 30% and allocated the cost savings to fund salary increments for the remaining staff. The resultant effect was more working hours and unrealistic targets for remaining staff.

 Employees general comments

·        We need more time with family. 8 to 5 jobs suck

·        I have a family to love. I will not stay here for long

·        Five years in an engineering class and I am paid like a janitor

·        If you give me work, do not follow me like my tail

  Conclusion

Employee engagement fuels company success. If you were not measuring employee engagement, it is time to start doing so.  Thank you for taking your time to go through this article. This article was meant to share knowledge and was written in my capacity. I accept no liability for any possible inconveniences, loss, or whatsoever that you may suffer because of this article. Always remember that you are in business to make money! Stay inspired.

About Farai Mugabe

The writer is called Farai Mugabe. He holds a master’s degree in Strategy and Governance and a BSc. Human Resource Management (Honours) degree. He is also an MSc. In Human Resource Management Degree candidate. He is a top graduate from Midlands State University. Farai was awarded two coveted academic awards by Midlands State University and these are, The MSU Book Prize and The T & H award for the best male student in the HR Management department.

Farai is a performance enabler and process designer who helps to align people’s hearts, minds, and hands with Key Performance metrics such as Revenue per employee, revenue per customer, Sales per employee, and Employee Engagement Index. He has hands-on experience in KRA and KPI setting, performance coaching, and evaluation of performance. Farai is a result-driven individual who has a strong passion for people and strategy issues. He is strong-willed and transformative in approach. During his post-graduate studies, Farai focused on boosting the productivity of knowledge workers within Zimbabwe’s technology-based firms. This article reaffirms his undying love for Strategy and people!

He is a published author of a novel called Midnight Mission and a career management book called Manage your Career like a business! He also has hands-on experience with managing labour relations and ensuring that a stable industrial relations climate is established. To date, Farai has a clean Industrial Relations record and has a passion for HR Technology.

He is currently working as a Group HR for a Medium enterprise company called ArkTrust Investments where he oversees HR operations for the following business units; Fairview Properties, SunCrown Estates, Ark construction, and Black Bird Precession Security. He has also worked for top organizations such as Lobel’s Bread, Midlands State University, Econet Wireless, and Webdev Online Solutions. He has initiated, developed, facilitated, and implemented several key initiatives that have impacted bottom business performance including the following.

·        Designing and implementing an employee engagement survey which sort to measure a company’s employee engagement index

·        Introducing an HR Metrics based Group HR report which tracks metrics such as earnings per employee, days worked per employee, critical staff turnover, voluntary staff turnover, and training hours per employee

·        Introducing a data-driven performance management approach to agribusiness operations aimed at enhancing production outcomes such as yield per hectare and number of new products introduced per year

·        Introduced an Electronic Compensation Management Toolkit (EMCT) which enabled the business to measure and track their salary and benefits competitiveness as benchmarked by at least ten competitors and similar companies on the market

·        Introduced a succession planning model which was meant to create sustainability of company operations by developing a talent cover ratio of 2 employees on talent bench for every 1 critical position

·        Initiated the adoption of an HR Information system meant to access HR data and employee personal information by the click of a button

·        Designing the Ignite Innovation Program meant to promote companywide innovation

·        Resolved a one-month long-standing dispute on unfair dismissal dispute between the business and an aggrieved former employee. The dispute had a potential cost of over US$20 000 to just US$744.00.

·        Designed the ‘Build and Deploy HR Strategy’. This strategy is anchored on the following pillars: Cost management, Business alignment, Business speed, Regulatory compliance, and Employer rand management

·        Ensured statutory compliance through the provision of safety clothing within three months of working.

In this article, Farai explains how to effectively manage probation using profited oriented, and legally sound approach. Farai unpacks this issue in logical flow with a deep analysis. He writes in his capacity and this article was written for sharing insights and academic purposes only. Therefore, he accepts no liability for any injuries, inconveniences, or whatsoever that this article might cause. He can be reached at the following email address: [email protected]