From Data to Impact: Making Employee Surveys Actually Work
It was the quarterly company-wide town hall for a global mid-size health care organization based in the Midwest. Approximately 400 employees sat in the US headquarters auditorium with another 3,300 joining virtually. Amanda, the Chief HR Officer stepped to the podium to deliver an update on the results of the company’s annual employee engagement survey.
“I’m pleased to report that for the fifth year in a row our overall score was in the top half of companies in our industry. Despite a challenging year for our business, our overall score of 67 dropped only a single point from last year. Looking at our scores for the 12 indexes, they were above the industry average this year on 7 of the 12, with our strongest areas of improvement year-on-year being accountability, collaboration, results orientation, and work ethic, all up between one and two points.”
Amanda went on to discuss some of the details, took a few questions, and closed with a call to action. “As we have done every year, we are asking every one of our 170 leaders with teams of 10 or more employees to meet with your team to review your own results. Our expectation is that each of you will come up with a detailed action plan for your team, focusing on the three to five areas the team agrees are most in need of improvement. Make sure to assign clear ownership for each of the actions, log your action plans into our employee survey database and track your progress in the system until you have closed on all of the actions.”
After the meeting as employees walked back to their desks a small group began discussing the meeting. “You know, it feels like Groundhog Day when Amanda talks about the survey results,” said Anthony from Marketing. “It’s the same every year …. we’re up a little here, down a little there, about the same on most things. But we’re still better than our competitors so keep it up, rah rah. And then there’s that whole action planning thing. Everybody knows that nothing ever happens with that. We have all these meetings that waste a lot of people’s time. Then we put together action plans that will never see the light of day and are told to put them into the system. But nobody ever asks to see the plans and there’s no more talk about the survey until it’s time for next year’s survey.”
While this story is hypothetical, it illustrates a common approach that companies take in addressing survey results. In an effort to ensure that follow-up actions target issues that may be unique to specific organizational segments, the company creates an onerous collection of action plans that are often overly granular, redundant, unwieldy, and poorly executed, putting a strain on the organization that creates inefficiency and reduces morale.
What are some other missteps organizations take in addressing employee survey results?
While the situation described above of overly complicated planning reflects one of the more common missteps, there are others:
No action: This is the other end of the spectrum from overly complex action planning. In these cases, organizations may create a lot of fanfare in sharing results with employees, then fail to take the next steps to formulate and execute any meaningful action plans. The result is that employees come to believe that the organization is not truly invested in addressing employee concerns and may be less apt to respond to future surveys.
Targeting the wrong issues: Organizations miss the mark in identifying the most important issues in analyzing survey results, failing to consider business context and strategy. One classic example is when organizations focus their attention purely on the lowest scoring items or categories in crafting action plans without recognizing that those may not be the most important areas to address given the organization’s intended business outcomes, priorities, and culture.
Lack of communication: Organizations neglect to develop a robust communications plan, including connecting actions to survey and business results in periodic updates to employees. In these cases, the organization may in fact be making progress on addressing survey results, but without proper communication employees are not aware of the progress and may assume not much has happened.
Too much time: Even thoughtful, sound action plans can lose their impact when months elapse between communication of survey results and execution of actions.
So what should organizations do to extract the most value from their employee surveys?
Consider context in analyzing results and targeting areas for attention
When organizations over-focus on the lowest scoring items or topics, they fail to consider important contextual factors. Take the example of an organization that is struggling to keep up with competitors in a volatile industry and requires significant talent upgrades across the board to reshape business strategy and drive change. For that organization, low scores on topics such as job security or work/life balance would not be surprising – nor would they be something the organization would likely choose to address. Rather, they might be more appropriately focused on topics such as innovation, strategic thinking, and risk taking. In that case, even moderate scores on those topics would make more sense as areas for focus than low scores on job security or work life balance.
Focus primarily on enterprise-wide issues with efficient action planning
While it is likely that survey results will vary among departments or divisions, companies will usually get stronger return on their survey investment by focusing primarily on enterprise results. The most effective approach is to identify those issues that generally apply across the enterprise, develop a clear, practical, unified set of actions to address the issues, and deploy them broadly. Although there are different ways to design this, here is a recommended approach:
Establish an Employee Action Council (EAC) comprised of senior leaders representing all parts of the organization (ideally 8-10 members), facilitated by an internal survey expert or external consultant.
Convene the Council to meet 4-5 times as a group over a period of up to six weeks, while completing short individual assignments between meetings. The meetings and pre-assignments would go something like this:
While focusing primarily on enterprise results is considered a best practice, there may be cases where survey results for specific segments of the organization reveal important issues that are not reflected in enterprise results. In those cases, it may be prudent for those departments/divisions to supplement the enterprise actions with actions to address their unique issues.
Communicate, communicate, communicate
The third essential component of a successful survey program is the effectiveness with which the organization leverages communication channels to reinforce their commitment to acting on survey results.
Many organizations will do all the right things once they receive the results – robust analysis, effective action planning, and clear communication of results and planned actions. Where they often fall off is when they fail to sustain communication throughout the year to make sure that employees know that progress is being made.
The most effective approach is a close partnership of the HR and Marketing & Communications teams. While the approach should fit within the context of the organization’s general approach to employee communications, here are a few tips:
Establish a location/tab on the company intranet to house survey related information – e.g. results, action plans, progress indicators, compelling success stories, recognition. Support the communications team in keeping updates fresh and interesting so that employees are motivated to check in from time to time.
Drive sustained attention by directing employees to the survey tab periodically through posts on the company’s main landing page, all employee emails, or other means of written communication that fit the company’s approach.
Utilize town halls and other employee gatherings at various points in the year to call attention to progress on the prior year’s survey and provide information about next year’s survey.
