Do's and Don'ts of employee engagement surveys thumbs up and down

Our last post offered the DO’s of creating and executing employee engagement surveys. This post will continue on and discuss what you should avoid when executing engagement surveys. Again, Effron and Ort (Authors of ‘One Page Talent Management’) have outlined the following points:

DON’T:

Use too much detail when reporting the results:

Using complicated and overly detailed descriptive statistics might be extremely useful for you to gain insight but it might completely deter or confuse managers and leaders. You should aim to present the survey results to leaders in a simple way that will guide them to take action.

Rely too much on meetings and focus groups:

This is a really great point because it might seem instinctive to ask as many people as possible for suggested ways to plan and execute engagement strategies (after all, employees and leaders know what would increase their own engagement); however, by relying solely on meetings and groups, you run the risk of leaving out a big piece of the picture. Groups might not be representative of the entire company, people might withhold information, and meetings can be rendered useless due to group think. Don’t get me wrong, meetings and groups should be conducted, but they should be held to provide clarity on results obtained by the surveys and not as a platform to plan overall strategy. In the end, a properly executed engagement survey will provide more than enough quantitative, representative data to plan engagement strategies.

Include Open-Ended Questions:

Comment boxes may seem like they provide insightful feedback; however, Effron and Ort argue that they distract managers from the reliable, quantitative data, and the results themselves are extremely biased. Managers should only be given facts that results in actions to increase engagement. Open-ended questions do provide an outlet for employees to express themselves and oftentimes comments go off on tangents unrelated to engagement.  Instead of putting that outlet in an engagement survey, make sure employees are aware of other mediums to express their thoughts or comments.

Stray from engagement-related questions:

There are probably tons of things that you are curious to know and would like to include in the survey but if you ask non-engagement related questions, you are straying from the goal, detracting from the value of the survey, and probably confusing managers. Keep this survey just for engagement and ask any other necessary questions in another, unrelated employee survey.

Not share the results:

I have to admit, this point just echoes one of the DO’s in my last post but I think it is such an important point that it deserves to be reiterated. Simply put: unless the results (and action-items) fall into the hands of leaders and managers that can execute them, the survey itself is useless to the organization.

The DO’s and DON’Ts that I have mentioned are high-level guidelines to use when planning to create and execute engagement surveys. There are many other things that should be considered such as reporting type, survey frequency, question formatting across departments, etc. These factors will differ greatly across organizations; however, the one thing that will remain true for all organizations is that any survey that is automated is easier to create, execute and report on. Online survey tools will allow you to begin an effective engagement strategy without having to spend copious amounts of time printing, collecting, reminding, and entering values into Excel. Also, if you are lucky enough to have an automated employee performance management solution (like emPerform), then you probably have a library of best-practice engagement survey questions that you can draw from.

Do's and Don'ts of employee engagement surveys thumbs up and down

In a  recently blog post, we spoke about the importance of employee engagement and how a lack thereof can snowball into serious financial losses for an organization (or serious opportunity costs – depending on how you want to look at it).

Employee engagement is an employee’s passion for their job which influences their willingness to learn & perform at work. Because it has been shown that there is a direct correlation between employee engagement and business profitability, it is no wonder that engagement has been a hot topic for quite some time and that organizations are seeking to increase engagement as much as possible.

One of the tips that I offered to help boost employee engagement is to ‘ask’. Since informal polling of staff through casual dialogue is not always feasible or effective, conducting employee engagement surveys is a great way to gauge overall engagement and to ‘ask’ staff about engagement issues.

I just finished reading ‘One Page Talent Management’ written by Mark Effron and Miriam Ort. In the book, the authors serve up clear and simple suggestions for crafting and executing employee engagement surveys.

DO:

Ask as few questions as possible:

If this is the first time that you are creating and executing an engagement survey, it might be difficult to hone in on the exact data that you  should aim to capture  but time spent prioritizing items will be worth it. Employees are more likely to complete surveys if they are relatively shorter and survey results are easier to compile and share if they are concise.

Ask Questions that are Actionable:

You might have tons of questions that can gauge engagement; however, unless management can act on the results, they are useless and will not help to increase engagement. A good practice is to run the potential questions by managers and ask them to provide two action items should the answers be ‘low’. If the managers cannot name any items, then the question should be left out, or reworded.

Share the Results with as Many Levels as Possible:

If a properly formatted engagement survey indicates low engagement AND provides the action items necessary to remedy it, then the results should be shared with as many levels of management as possible. Sharing the results is the only way to improve the situation across the entire organization. If the survey process itself is fully automated, then this should not be a problem at all and would make sharing the results as easy as clicking a button. *

Conduct Engagement Surveys Annually:

If an engagement survey is formatted properly, offers a clear degree of engagement and offers actionable items for increasing engagement, then it just makes sense that management has timely versions to refer to. Some companies even find it beneficial to conduct very short engagement surveys semi-annually in order to have timely data and to gauge the effects of engagement initiatives.

Set Engagement Improvement Goals:

After you have conducted your first engagement survey, you should have a handle on the status of employee engagement across each department and the organization as a whole. Use these results to set measurable engagement goals that managers and the organization are expected to reach. Accountability will help to ensure that a company’s leaders at every level are committed to improving engagement.

* Included within emPerform is an eSurvey module that allows organizations to quickly create, distribute, and analyze web-based surveys. Also available with emPerform is a library of best-practice survey questions for all surveys types.

The Power of ReportingBy: Natalie Trudel

A lot of focus is placed on streamlining and automating employee performance management processes. There are many reasons why this is the case –  reduced administrative costs, decreased human error, effective archiving of past reviews, automated succession plans and compensation management ; however, one of the ultimate goals of automating talent management is the ability to report and analyze performance data. After all, analytics display results and are crucial for decision making.

Reporting and analysis can help you determine (among many other things):

• Which managers have a tendency to rate either too high or too low
• Who your top performers and high potentials are
• How many people are contributing to the overall goals of the organization
• What they’re doing as individuals to support those goals
• Who is above and below average in terms of performance
• Results between divisions, departments and positions
• Year over year employee performance trends and rating changes

 

Overall, there is a great power in the ability to efficiently generate accurate and timely reports and share them with different levels within the organization.

Proper employee performance reporting and analytics should be the backbone of many HR and company goals. It is no longer enough to rely on traditional, administrative HR reports to express the health of a company’s employee performance. In order to remain competitive, an organization must have clear insight into the status of their biggest investment – their talent. It might, however, be overwhelming to begin planning an effective employee performance and analytics strategy that will make the most of your automated system.

emPerform boasts one of the most powerful and flexible reporting tools on the talent management market. As such, we have a wealth of knowledge related to best-practice Employee Performance reporting and analytics.

Which reports to pull – See examples of which reports should be of interest to each level within your organization: HR, Executives, Management, Employees, and Company-wide.

Report frequency – Learn how often certain reports should be run and analyzed.

Sharing Reports – Learn how to properly present and deliver the reports to relevant parties.

Report Data – Learn tips for ensuring that your report data is accurate.

This webinar will be hosted by John Smith, Director of Enterprise Business Solutions at Corporate Renaissance Group – a global consulting firm. John has dabbled in every area of business from finance to HR and analytics technology. In this webinar, John will share his experiences with every level and department within an organization and show you which reports and analytics are of interest to each party.

I recently finished a book called, ‘What the Dog Saw’ by Malcolm Gladwell (great read by the way). One of the chapters focused on homelessness and went over the various costs associated with managing the unfortunate issue (healthcare, shelter, etc. etc.). Gladwell eloquently defended his theory that in an ideal world, it would be far less expensive to SOLVE the problem of homelessness than it is to MANAGE it. I am not defending his theory on this subject, but his viewpoint really struck me and got me thinking about the other areas of business and life where the costs of managing something actually outweighs what it would cost to solve it or eliminate it. I thought this to be a very fitting argument for Automated Talent Management Solutions.

HR practitioners everywhere have invested a lot of money, time and energy over the years in managing the shortcomings of their employee performance management processes. Paper-Based appraisal systems have never been ideal for collecting and analyzing reviews and many professionals have become fed up and have implemented work-arounds to help facilitate or ‘manage’ the process.

How much time have you spent re-formatting appraisal forms so that they are easier to read and fill out in the hopes that the changes will prompt employees and managers to complete them on time? Or perhaps you have posted the forms to an intranet for easy access? No doubt you have a trusty excels spreadsheet that you use to manually track who has submitted what and to calculate some sort of results. Also, somewhere on your desk, in your drawer, or in your cabinet at this very moment is a plethora of folders individually labeled with each employee name that you use to attempt to file away historical appraisals. Finally, when a manager or executive asks for a status update on a company initiative or an HR performance overview, you probably have a scripted response that will buy you some time to manually compile whatever data you can. Am I close?

Although these work-arounds help to manage the problem, they still aren’t ideal and even close to being  simple, organized, efficient, traceable, or intuitive enough to effectively distribute, collect, and monitor performance reviews. You should give yourself credit for being inventive enough to attempt to manage an awful process given what you have to work with but instead of managing the bottlenecks of traditional processes, companies are getting wise to the reality that they should just eliminate the shortcomings by implementing automated performance review and talent management processes.

Automated Performance Management (EPM) Solutions replaced paper-based appraisals the same way that email replaced fax – everything is stored and accessible at the click of a mouse.

Online, all-inclusive EPM systems are designed to easily, quickly, and efficiently collect employee performance data; however, they go leaps and bounds further as they manage employee development, integrate compensation planning, and intuitively report on the real time status of all the aforementioned functionality.

Overall – Automated EPM Systems go beyond eliminating many shortcomings of the traditional appraisal process; they improve talent management as a whole and tie everything together in a nice little bow so that organizational goals can be reflected in employee activities all year round. The best part is that choice of deployment options (on-premise and hosted) allows every company to take advantage of automation- regardless of size or industry.

Automated EPM Solutions are a dream for HR professionals because they free up time (and desk space) and allow companies to focus on improvement instead of administration. So instead of trying to find clever ways to smooth out the bumps in your current talent management processes – just eliminate the bumps all together. In the long run, you will end up saving time, money, and avoiding many headaches if you solve the problem instead of trying to manage it.