Are your staff work-happy?
When it comes to tracking employee engagement, there’s a clear trend emerging. Simply asking questions in a one-off annual survey doesn’t really cut it. There’s a whole lot more out there that can help you to delve deeper into what’s really happening in your workplace.
If you really want to understand more about what your staff feel about working in your organisation, follow our three-step process.
1) Define what employee engagement means to your organisation
There are two key ‘employee engagement’ factors. The first – whether employees genuinely feel rewarded by the work they do and the second, if and how that work contributes to an overall department or whole business objective. Many employee engagement activities focus on the ‘feeling rewarded’ part but don’t necessarily tie in with the broader context, what the individual’s contribution is to a departmental or company goal.
If you can find pockets of employee dissatisfaction you can then start to identify commonalities, themes and address potential causes. On the other hand, if you can spot pockets of employee positivity and high output, you can begin to understand what your organisation is doing right.
Want to know where to start? Download our Employee Engagement Questionnaire Cheatsheet
2) Decide how and when to track engagement
There are many different ways to measure and track employee engagement. The HR Trend Institute identifies that there’s an ever-evolving spectrum of tools you can now use, from an annual or biannual staff survey through to shorter, smarter, frequent ‘pulse’ surveys or real-time tracking methods which analyse email traffic and themes. Using different methods and tools at different times during the year or during the employee journey through the organisation offers more flexibility, allows you to be more targeted and have more frequent or real time feedback.
Many organisations haven’t tracked engagement as well as they could have or they’ve been put off. There might have been a poor response to staff surveys in the past or there have not been the resources to analyse or benchmark data properly or perhaps there was simply not enough time. What’s needed are results that are timely and that can lead to action.
In house or external engagement experts?
Whether you decide to track employee engagement in house or use external consultants to help you – or use a combination of both depends on your situation. Carrying out an annual employee engagement survey will mean developing survey questions, setting up systems for data capture as well as having sufficient internal resource to analyse, evaluate and report survey results. The downside of a DIY approach is that question design, analysis and interpretation can be time consuming when there are more pressing HR issues that need attention.
Using external consultants like BIAS with expertise in questionnaire design and very familiar with the latest available survey software and systems for data capture and analysis could be a faster and more cost-effective option. It also ensures respondent anonymity which leads to an improved response rate and improved honesty. We can also deliver solutions that will automate data collation and enhance it, giving your managers useful and meaningful insights so that they can generate and refine action plans that respond to conversations taking place in the workplace.
3) Combine all your data and decipher employee engagement
The responses you get from employee engagement surveys are an important part of the engagement jigsaw. If you want to take more meaningful action then ideally you need a little more and that’s where we can help.
Making sure you’re using all the data you already have is an essential and often overlooked opportunity. You can combine answers to survey questions with other data about the participant and the organisation including financial performance data, staff recruitment or staff turnover figures or performance review data. This can help you to understand where action is required and assess which actions will have the greatest impact.
At BIAS, we can give you the insights you need by doing all the work on the data for you. We are data people so you don’t have to be.
If you have done an annual employment survey but are not sure what to do next or you’re on the lookout for new ways to track and influence what your staff really feel about work, please get in touch.