The Hidden Magic in your Employee Survey

Does your workplace do an employee survey?

I've been speaking with a couple of clients recently who are concerned about their employee engagement survey. They are either rolling out the survey tool and barely getting any uptake or receiving disappointing results.??It's not a good sign for engagement if people don't engage with the survey. Not good news, but the answer to low uptake and poor results is the same. And it has nothing to do with how you promote your survey, how survey fatigued your people may be, that people are busy or that it's not the right time for some reason.

It's all about whether you are ready to embrace a slightly longer-term focus, and what you do now.

And here is my best advice. As these surveys tend to be repeated every year or two, and people are busy, survey fatigued, etc., just take on ONE THING at an organisational level. Focus on making a change in that ONE THING and do it until the next survey is coming around. For annual surveys, you only have 8 or 9 months from when you release the data until you have to start gearing up for the next one. And that's not much time to make a highly visible, tangible impact that makes the workplace better.

Workplaces can get overly ambitious and want to fix lots of things - because we see the evidence in our survey results that maybe there are lots of things to fix. By prioritising ONE THING and doing it deep, you not only get to make significant positive change that people can see, but you can show people that you listened and followed through. And that builds trust.

If the response rate is really low, don't ask each department or team to come up with their own actions. They'll just get overtaken by 'busy'. Get everyone working on one goal. There might be multiple ways to do that and align with different departments' work activity, people's communication styles and workplace demographics.

You now have one clear story to tell. Don't let the story get sucked into routine reporting. Make it clear that this is a result of what 'we the people' said in the survey. Repeatedly linking activities, measurable impacts and individual and team stories to the changes being made due to your survey means answering next year's survey seems more reasonable.

If your employees have been diligently answering a survey for a few years and can't point at what has happened, then why bother?

The simple act of paying positive attention to people has a great deal to do with productivity. Tom Peters, American Business Writer

Over time, you lift engagement by leveraging engagement survey data, and that's when the magic really happens.

Until next time,

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