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Optimize Employee Engagement Surveys

The best way to keep employees engaged? Implement change based on survey feedback.

  • Most organizations spend a lot of time and resources conducting surveys to gather knowledge about employee satisfaction.
  • However, such surveys should cover much more than overall employee happiness. The survey is a means to an end – the objective should be to assess employee engagement in order to identify and implement necessary change to better the organization.
  • In most cases, organizations are not only failing to leverage engagement surveys to their full potential, but they are also hurting employee engagement due to the lack of change implementation and communication.

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Critical Insight

  • The purpose of an engagement survey is organizational change: to first measure the drivers behind engagement, and then to improve it.
  • Surveys should be treated as projects. A project plan with milestones, deliverables, stakeholders, and goals should be drafted and agreed upon before the process begins.
  • To optimize the use of employee engagement surveys, they should be developed, administered, and analyzed with objective third-party involvement.
  • A company’s priorities must be reflected in the survey questions, and in how the results are analyzed and reported.
  • Survey data should be used to determine what makes employees happy, but more importantly, it should identify what is important to them when it comes to engagement.
  • The most significant errors occur in the back end of the survey project – deciding what to change, executing on the proposed changes, and then communicating them to the organization.

Impact and Result

  • Gain a better understanding of what effective employee engagement surveys can and should deliver, and how to carry them out.
  • Use a variety of tools and templates to help choose and use a canned or customized survey approach, deploy the survey to gain high participation rates, and report the results to identify priority change areas.

Optimize Employee Engagement Surveys Research & Tools

1. Understand the drivers behind employee engagement

Conduct an engagement survey that not only measures engagement, but also leads to organizational change.

2. Treat the employee engagement survey as a project

Ensure that all stages are carried out thoroughly and effectively before, during, and after the survey is conducted.

3. Slice and dice the results and present them on both top and granular levels

Communicate results back to the company and start the change process.

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About McLean & Company

McLean & Company is an HR research and advisory firm providing practical solutions to human resources challenges via executable research, tools, diagnostics, and advisory services that have a clear and measurable impact on your business.

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Contributors

  • A series of employee engagement surveys administered by McLean & Company that measure employee engagement levels as well as the importance of engagement drivers.
  • In-depth interviews with HR professionals, subject matter experts, employees, and managers over a two-year period.