How do I run a successful staff survey?
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Good businesses that are genuinely serious about improving productivity and profitability understand that both things are generally only possible through a culture that values positive staff engagement.
The problem is that this isn’t always something that’s immediately tangible or even measurable.
One of the big barriers to making sure you’re always across the way your people feel about your product or service and the day-to-day experience of working with you is that these days it’s difficult enough just to keep a multitude of plates spinning.
When life is busy – and as we come out of lockdown and work our way back towards something that might even approach normality as we once knew it, the process of rebuilding businesses means life is busier than ever – it’s easy to forget that we need our people to be on board with us for whatever journey lies ahead.
One of the most effective ways of taking the temperature of your workplace culture and engagement is to run a staff survey – but these come with distinct potential pitfalls and require careful thought and management.
Here is the Constantia Consulting guide to running an employee engagement process that not only tells you how healthy your workplace is culturally, but also identifies the areas where you need to improve and how to do that.
1. What’s the problem you’re trying to solve?
Have a look around your office or offices and be honest about what you see. Are your desks or workspaces filled with cheerful, industrious people all happily getting on with the work they’ve been given, or working on their own initiative for the greater good of the business?
Or is there a bit of clockwatching or Candy Crush going on?
Maybe there’s honest endeavour in some parts of the business, but less in others.
By seeing where there is high engagement and where engagement is lower, you’ll be able to identify not only whether you have an immediate problem to solve, but also which part or parts of your business need your greatest attention.
And don’t think that just because you can’t spot an obvious problem there’s no material benefit to undertaking a staff engagement project – because there is always room for improvement – and even your happiest and most engaged people will have suggestions for how you should prioritise your employee strategy.
So, before you rush full-pelt into a staff survey you’ve knocked up in Survey Monkey or Doodle, think carefully about where your issues are, what you want to achieve from the engagement piece and how best to structure it to get the honest feedback you need to be able to solve your problems.
2. Commit to the process
When it comes to employee engagement there’s nothing worse than a process that’s simply paying lip service to getting staff feedback and is unlikely to be acted upon – it will just breed bad feeling and resentment.
In fact, if you have no intention of implementing change, you’re better off not doing the engagement work at all.
Being committed means working with your HR team to establish how you will feed back the messages and at the same time communicate how you will identify and then implement new policies and procedures that address those changes, and the timescale in which that will be achieved.
3. Make it truly anonymous
No matter how good a leader you are, people are genuinely pretty nervous about being completely honest about how they feel if they believe that honest approach might impede their career development.
You will need to be identify the broad area of the business in which the recipient works, in order to identify any potential trends or problems.
But if you only have one or two people working in the different business functions, then it’s probably best to find a way of getting the information you need without forcing them to give answers that identify them.
Having optional fields can help here – so, too, can ensuring that instead of role-specific questions you ask broader questions about career development and quality of leadership, as these are most likely to be the areas that breed dissatisfaction.
4. Make it relevant
An employee engagement project might be intended to help you to improve your business, but it needs to be about the people answering the questions – because if it isn’t, they’ll see the survey for what it might really be.
Link your questions to areas that genuinely impact on your people – working hours and conditions, career development opportunities, staff benefits, leadership shortcomings, daily priorities etc.
To make it really relevant – and also to give you the information you need to be able to make meaningful change – you should include a mixture of open and closed questions.
A closed question seeks only a binary answer – usually ‘yes’ or ‘no’ – whereas an open question requires the respondent to expand on the subject.
Asking, How do you think your career development can be improved? is going to get a very different response to the question, Are you happy with your career development opportunities?
Blending a mixture of open and closed questions can also be effective.
Using the example above, the first part of a question might be Are you happy with your career development opportunities? But following it with Tell us why you gave the answer you did allows the staff member not only to indicate how satisfied they are, but also to explain why they feel the way they do.
5. Give staff time to answer
There are two issues here. First, it’s about building time into your employees’ days to actually complete the engagement survey. But then it’s about ensuring the survey is active for long enough that everyone is included.
Different businesses approach this in different ways.
Some set aside a specific time of each day for a certain period during which their people can down effectively tools on their day-to-day tasks and focus on the survey. Others simply leave the survey live over a fixed period and allow their teams to complete it when it suits them.
Either way, you need to keep the survey active for enough time that everyone has a chance to fill it in – but not so long that by the times you’ve received every survey back the answers have become a little irrelevant.
6. Back it up with internal comms
Sending out a staff engagement survey in an email and then doing nothing until the closing date is a fast way to get a low response rate.
Strategic communication that reminds your people about the survey and the benefits of completing it will help to underline the fact it’s a process that’s important to you and will also act as a proactive device to encourage them to complete it.
7. Walk the talk
Once you’ve got the responses back, tell your teams what you’ll be doing next and explain when you’ll be communicating both the results and your action plan to implement those changes that your business believes are important as a result.
You’ll then need to analyse the answers you’ve received – and if you don’t have an HR professional within the business, it’s often a good idea to get an external agency to do that for you – and identify what the key themes are and what you need to do to address them.
8. Communicate the new plan
Once all that work has been completed, it’s time to work up a comms plan to let your people know what you’re going to be doing to effect change in your business as a result of the feedback you’ve received – and how and when that will happen.
You may decide that some change issues need further work and should be led by staff. Or you may want to get an external impartial agency to undertake further qualitative and quantative work to drill down deeper into more critical areas of the responses.
But however you decide to approach the follow up work your staff engagement process demands, you need to make sure your people understand how that process will be delivered and when it will be delivered by.
9. Track change
After all of that comes the actual change process and you will need to identify processes that allow you to monitor and track your progress against you publicly stated aims.
Employee engagement isn’t always easy – sometimes you discover your staff have a very different view of the things you think you do well, or you might find the changes that are required present an unexpected financial conundrum.
But when carried out and implemented well they are almost always rewarding.
If you’d like to know more about how Constantia Consulting can help you to test employee engagement in your business, please contact us for an informal chat.
