The human resources department isn't the only one that benefits from employee engagement surveys. HR teams can certainly benefit from engagement surveys in terms of knowing where to focus their efforts. However, the effects of engagement surveys can be felt at all levels of the company. The company wins when it listens to its employees, invests in the employee experience, and builds a positive and supportive work environment.
In the right hands, engagement surveys can have a lasting positive impact on your business. Be mindful of how your organization measures employee feedback, acts on survey findings and tracks progress in employee engagement surveys. The following will highlight the top reasons employee engagement surveys are so important - not just for HR departments, but for the entire company.
Here are seven benefits of engagement surveys:
Measuring employee satisfaction and collecting feedback regularly enables your organization to make more informed hiring, development, and retention decisions. Putting employee engagement first and working to improve it constantly can help you create an environment where employees feel supported to succeed. The importance of employee engagement surveys in your organization can be summed up in the following seven reasons.
Engagement surveys can help:
1. Give your employees a voice
Employee engagement surveys are one of the few opportunities where employees can give honest feedback about their work experience. Providing workers with a safe, heard, and valued survey experience will promote candid and constructive feedback.
It is important to include your employees at every step of the survey process, even if you are only conducting annual surveys and periodic pulse surveys. If you plan to conduct employee engagement surveys, don't forget to include open-ended questions as well as Likert-scale questions (a five-point scale on which respondents answer “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”). Open-ended questions allow employees to share any ideas or thoughts they believe will increase employee engagement.
Next, you'll need to share the survey results with your staff, as well as your HR team's proposed action plan. By letting employees know how the Human Resources department is interpreting their feedback and using it to make a difference at your organization, they will feel valued and heard. It will be easier to gain both your employees' support and their participation in future surveys once they realize your company is sincerely committed to improving its workplace culture.
2. Identify areas of opportunity
By measuring your employees' commitment, motivation, and passion for their roles and your company, engagement surveys can help you identify which areas of your business are thriving - and which ones need improvement. By asking the right questions, you can gain insight into each stage of the employee lifecycle and direct your organization's efforts where they're most needed.
As an example, your results might indicate your employees feel underprepared for their roles, don't know how to grow their careers at your company, or lack a work-life balance. Having knowledge of these issues can help you make better decisions about workplace planning and initiatives.
3. Drive meaningful change
It is only when your HR team knows how and where to focus their efforts and resources that you can ensure the greatest impact for your employees. Following up on our previous example, if your survey revealed that employees feel underprepared for their roles, your business can make a more informed decision about how to address and resolve the issue. In order to fulfill this objective, you might need to redesign onboarding programs, introduce on-the-job training, and even launch an internal mentorship program to prepare employees for success.
As a result of your engagement surveys, you can weigh your options, create an action plan, and drive meaningful change within your organization. Through subsequent surveys, you can track the impact of your actions over time, using those learnings to update or continue your business plan.
4. Build trust with employees
The key to improving employee experience is to take action once you've identified ways to do so. By responding swiftly and deliberately to employee feedback, you send a strong message to your staff: your company cares about its employees and is doing everything it can to develop them.
In order to earn the trust of employees, make sure you share your initial action plan with them, along with periodic updates on the impact any new initiatives and policies are having on their work environment. Employees will be more forthcoming in future surveys when they feel that their suggestions are heard, valued, and acted upon. By increasing survey response rates and collecting more candid feedback, your company can collect more accurate and useful information that can help it make informed engagement decisions.
5. Shape company culture
The creation of an employee-friendly workplace culture requires more than an annual engagement survey. To show your employees you care about them, your business needs to address employee feedback quickly after identifying potential improvements.
Companies should constantly listen to the needs of employees and act swiftly to address these needs. No matter what initiatives your business introduces, whether it's a well-being program or career paths to enhance employee professional development, every initiative your company adopts helps shape the culture of the organization.
Simply listening to employees and acting upon their feedback sends a powerful message to your workforce: You are committed to fostering a work environment where your employees can thrive. It takes time, effort, and commitment to engage employees, but the effort is well worth it.
6. Hold leadership accountable
Although all employees contribute to shaping the culture of your company, senior managers have the greatest influence. The relationship between employee engagement and profitability makes it paramount for your leadership team to place employee experience at the top of the priority list. As with HR teams, senior management needs guidance on where to focus their efforts and leverage their influence. This is where employee engagement surveys can be helpful.
In order to create and raise awareness for People-centric programs, your senior leaders can use employee engagement survey results to stay informed about the employee experience. Executives can, for example, use town halls, all-hands meetings, and departmental meetings to announce new initiatives based on survey results. This might include moving to a remote-first work environment or adopting a parental leave policy that encourages all parents to take time off, rather than just primary caregivers.
Furthermore, senior management often controls the money and spending, so you need to secure their approval for any new initiatives and additional resources. Having raised awareness about important initiatives, executives can then leverage their influence to increase adoption and participation in existing and developing People programs. A new employee recognition software, for example, can be used by your executives to recognize the hard work of their direct reports and teams regularly. This will enable them to set a positive example for their employees and encourage them to use it too and acknowledge valuable colleagues in their own way.
Ensure senior leaders know how important engagement is by including it in their company-wide or personal objectives and key results (OKRs). As a result, executives will be held accountable for improving employee engagement levels across the entire organization.
7. Benchmark your data
Lastly, you can benchmark your own engagement survey results over time to identify areas for improvement and measure the impact of your initiatives by collecting and tracking engagement survey results. As a result, you may be able to address change more proactively.
As an example, if you notice a decline in manager satisfaction scores across the organization, you can offer leadership training. In the event that your next engagement or pulse survey indicates an increase in manager satisfaction, you can assume your program worked - and use that information to proactively create more training for new and existing leaders.
Using engagement data to benchmark your business can also help it become more resilient. In a dynamic workplace, employee and business needs are constantly changing and can sometimes conflict. By referencing historical data and understanding the context behind a change in employee sentiment, your team members can make more informed and impactful People decisions - and prioritize sometimes conflicting needs.
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