Their popularity may be waning but the annual employee engagement survey still has its place for a large number of companies, even if it is increasingly part of a wider range of feedback collection methods. I’ve been running national and international surveys for over nine years and, while technology has moved on hugely during this time, I’ve noticed that attitudes to project managing/running the surveys are often stuck in the past. What should those running such projects be focusing on to ensure that they actually meet corporate needs?

1. Take the pain out of modelling hierarchies
If there’s one word that comes up time and time again when discussing the running of employee surveys it is “hierarchy”, normally accompanied by groans. Modelling the hierarchy within an organisation is vital to give context to results, providing the ability to drill down and compare different business units, locations or teams with the certainty that you are comparing apples with apples.

However, understanding and modelling hierarchies normally requires a lot of work and resources, particularly at a time when many organisations are undergoing constant change. Typically this means going through a huge process of creating one, or more, hierarchies months in advance of the annual survey. This then gets refined multiple times up to an agreed “sign off” date which inevitably gets pushed back a couple of times.

The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way anymore. With a modern HR-focused feedback system you can automatically use existing data to create your model. By using a feed from the company’s HR software or other business system it means that a hierarchy can now be setup in a matter of hours and can be completed just a few days before the survey goes live. This ensures that data is as accurate as possible and not months out of date as is often currently the case.

2. Coping with change – during your project
Technology also allows you to cope with major reorganisations happening mid-survey. Modern feedback systems enable you to create multiple hierarchies as standard so it’s no longer an onerous task to quickly create a different view of the company’s organisation post changes. Naturally the flexibility with hierarchies shouldn’t end there – many modern systems include an “organisation processor” module.  This means that users for different locations/areas of the business can logon and update the hierarchy as and when suits them. Having an integrated system like this also makes straightforward to give access to live response rate reporting data and helps with disseminating reports.

3. Reporting speed
One of the criticisms levelled against annual surveys is the amount of time it takes to analyse and provide results to the business. This lag means that issues raised in a survey can take months to reach managers, meaning they may not get the chance to solve problems until they have got significantly worse.

Cutting the time from survey completion to reporting is another area where technology has taken a real step forward. You can now employ dashboard-based technology which gives access to results on the fly (but with confidentiality thresholds built in).  I’ve seen this work best with a daily update feature. However, client maturity can be an issue in this area as not all client side project managers necessarily understand that the results from week one won’t be the same as at the end of week three. Education is therefore key.

4. Empowering end users
Delivering results through a wider range of reporting options, tailored to your needs, is another area where technology has taken a real step forward. For example, companies can now design, build and run their own suite of post-survey PowerPoint reports which can then be created and distributed within days of the survey closing.

Additionally, giving managers access to interactive, drill-down dashboards that are personalised to their needs empowers them with the information they require to better run their teams or departments. If you add in suggested best practice actions to be taken in case of low scores in specific areas, this closes the loop even tighter, providing managers with everything they need to improve engagement quickly and in line with corporate policies. I see this trend continuing until the role of traditional providers becomes largely limited to only providing consultancy advice.

Finally, you can bring together reporting and action through a single portal like interface. Easy to set up, these give managers access to their dashboards, action planning and results from a single ‘one stop shop’, branded to your organisation’s look and feel. These portals make it easy to set up further discussions around results, either for action planning or to delve deeper into specific issues that the initial survey has uncovered.

Of course one of the biggest conversations in the employee engagement world is whether the annual employee survey still has relevance today. While they do need to be supplemented by other forms of feedback, I don’t think they are going to disappear anytime soon, if only due to the KPI demands many organisations have.

However, I believe the engagement agenda is being advanced by some of the exciting new technology now available to revitalise the annual survey. For example, companies can create pop up communities, based on answers to specific questions, allowing online conversations and further surveys to be directed to groups of people in a matter of minutes.

Technology within the annual employee survey has moved on – now is the time for project managers to explore how it can help them, and their businesses, get the most out of these major exercises by listening more closely to their employees.