Employee surveys are not quite the endangered species that some articles would have you believe. Their predicted decline goes back a few years and hasn’t materialised.
What we are seeing, though, is a shift in how and when companies want to get employees’ views. This shift requires evolution in both employee survey technology and the wider approach to employee research. Innovation is essential if surveys are to remain relevant and useful as a business improvement tool.
The case for employee survey evolution
Increasingly, companies find that one big annual engagement survey doesn’t give them the insights they need, when they need them. They argue that it’s too slow, too infrequent and not reflective of the changeability in modern businesses.
Instead of, or in some cases in addition to, a full survey, companies are favouring smaller but more ‘pulse check’ surveys. This could involve:
· Running half-yearly, quarterly or even monthly surveys
· Pulse surveys that are open to all staff, specific business areas or smaller, representative employee groups
· A scaled-down version of the annual survey, capturing snapshot views on all aspects of the business or more tactical surveys on specific initiatives or business priorities.
What works for your organisation will naturally depend on your needs and context. However frequently you survey, and whatever it covers, it must deliver real insight that can improve your business and employee experience.
Why you should think differently about engagement
There’s a danger that measuring engagement becomes all about numbers and the business. You mustn’t lose sight of the people behind the metrics.
This kind of thing happens when engagement survey providers focus only on what employees think or say about their employer, and not on what they do or how they perform.
This misses a fundamentally important part of engagement – namely, what the employee feels. We cover this in another blog – employee engagement, but with feeling.
Our ‘Think, Feel, Do’ model accounts for this. By analysing how employees feel (both about their organisation, and their own emotional and psychological feelings), you’ll naturally be able to join the ‘think’ and ‘do’ parts together. This, in turn, provides a far more accurate and complete measure of employee engagement.
And, by better understanding the psychological concepts that relate to the ‘feel’ aspect of engagement, particularly around health and wellbeing, you’ll be able to enhance employee engagement.
How else you can innovate with engagement surveys
Look beyond the ‘standard’ benchmark employee survey questions. Doing this will extend the survey’s reach and relevance and deliver real business value. Here are two ideas to consider:
1. Make demographic questions more detailed. Add in gender, ethnicity, age, first language, etc. This enables detailed data analysis, essentially giving you an equality and diversity survey for free.
2. Add survey questions on areas of interest such as stress or health and wellbeing. Doing this will mean that, instead of having only one key driver analysis against engagement, you’ll have a set of key drivers to measure that predict health and wellbeing-related issues. Again, this effectively provides you with another survey for no additional cost.
Read more about this subject in an article written by one of our consultants on the future of employee engagement surveys in HR Magazine.
References:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2014/06/25/quantified-self-meet-the-quantified-employee/
