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Dear Community,

Who of you are familiar with the following questions:

What is going well / not well in your daily work?
What suggestions for improvement would you have for your lead or your team?
What do you wish for in your role or in the company?

 

All these questions (and more) are addressed in employee engagement surveys. The goals of such surveys can vary. For instance, they can be used for:

💯 Performance and feedback
🚨 Satisfaction and early warning system
👍 Opportunities for improvement 

 

Employee engagement surveys not only show that you care, but they can also be helpful for strategies, policies, and help HR with future challenges.
 

If the surveys add so much value for employees and companies, why do employees often get the feeling that their answers are not acted upon or become less important?

"What" happens after such questioning is an indication of whether or not respondents feel understood. If the "elephants" in the room are not being addressed, the evaluation might seem to be not taken fully seriously.


Which phases play the most important role, especially after the employee engagement survey?

Evaluation: 

The focus here should be on collecting the information from the survey. Based on the evaluation, follow-up measures should be developed among the stakeholders. Possible solutions can be worked out with the help of workshops, for example. Clear communication and openness are crucial here.

 

Follow-up: 

To make sure that the improvement actions or changes implemented have a long-term impact, regular monitoring is important. Before this step, clear responsibilities should be set so that you know exactly who to assign what to and who may need help with implementation.

 

How often do you carry out employee engagement surveys? How do you conduct them, and to what extent? I'm looking forward to your insights! 🤩


💡 Does this topic spark your interest? Then take a look at our HR lexicon and discover more on the topic of “employee engagement surveys”.

Best,
Melissa

My personal experience with employee engagement surveys is that management is typically attempting to show the positives not look for opportunities for improvement. 

I absolutely think that they should be anonymous as well. When the persons name is associated then they cannot be completely honest / open about constructive feedback. 

Thank you for sharing this!

Sara 

 

Hi @sleslie99 👋
thanks for sharing your personal experience and your thoughts about employee engagement surveys.
I 100% agree with what you said about the anonymity. This allows employees/ participants to truly be honest in their evaluation. And that is in the best case what the management strives for in order to then take action as described in the article. 🤝

I would really love to hear what other Community Members can share about employee engagement surveys! @Colin_ME @xtine08 @marielle.van.wieringen maybe you can share additional thoughts on this? 😇 

Have a lovely day and all the best,
Melissa

@Melissa - you might wish to speak with @Mariana Itza de Miguel as I was one a Zoom with her earlier this week.

I can share a lot on this topic as it was my specialist area before my current role.

 

The biggest piece is that Engagement / Experience surveys do not directly improve productivity.

To improve productivity you need engagement and targetted execution

What I mean by this is:

  • an engaged employee might not have good training, technique or tools to be able to execute = poor productivity
  • an disengaged employee might have had great training, technique and tools but is unwiling to execute = poor productivity
  • You need great engagement, great training, technique tools and targetted execution so that what an individual or team work on is what you want them to work on, first, and what they work on they can do so well because they have all the training, technique and tools at their disposal, second, and finally because of all the above plus their engagement - they are intrinsically motivated (not extrinsically) to do a great job, produce great work = productivity.

 

In terms of survey frequency / action delivery

Only have surveys have frequently as you can then provide meanginful feedback on what you do with that data.

Also share all the data scores (not the personal comments) to demonstrate transparency - even the things where a company scores negative - noone is perfect so to pretend that you are great at everything is a lie.

 

Surveys should be annonymous - but you may wish to then ask for volunteers to be able to come forward to work with you on getting deeper feedback and also work on actionable changes - getting more employee engagement through actions and involvement.

 

The Survey is just the ‘discovery’ phase - you then need to design and delivery solutions to improve your survey scores (even if your scores are good they won’t be perfect).

===
 

Also the Survey is always only one part of People Strategy and the Employees need to understand that. They might want more holidays and feed this back in an employee survey… but that might not be the same priority as the Leadership - this difference of priorities needs to be communicated so that people understand that giving feedback doesn’t always mean you get what you ask for…

It it were then Personio would have built lots of solutions that me and anyone else writing an ‘idea’ has suggested - that obviously isn’t how it works - but we can certain influence the direction the Personio solution takes by prodiving our feedback via the community etc.

 

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