You’ve completed a great survey, you’ve got tons of insightful feedback. But what do you do now? How do you make the most of your employee survey results?
By not taking feedback seriously you risk creating a poor culture, or losing valuable team members, so you need to take action!
💡 Employees who don’t feel comfortable providing upward feedback are 16% less likely to stay in their organisation.
There are some steps you need to take that will show your employees that you’re using their feedback to improve the employee experience. After all, you asked for their feedback for a reason - you want employees to know that you hear them and value their input.
Review the Results
You can help gain extra insights from your results by analysing them effectively. It can help leaders connect with the feedback and understand the action that they need to take next.
Consider key themes, quick wins and longer term big wins from each survey.
Look for patterns - Are there areas in which your organisation scored low across the board? This is an obvious place to start. Identifying gap that are affecting employee happiness is key to moving the needle.
Dissect the data - Not all teams work the same, and not all teams have the same concerns. Data creates stories at both an individual and a team level, so be sure to consider both.
Consider any key demographics in the data if your survey data set is large enough. A key insight we often find in surveys is the difference in engagement levels based on length of service.
The insight this can bring can contribute hugely to retention strategies and understanding a typical career cycle in your organisation.
There may be key areas, questions or themes that you might want to keep a close track on. You can build these into a dashboard or report that is regularly reviewed, so that progress can be monitored.
There is a word of caution when it comes to segmentation, it shouldn’t come at the cost of anonymity.
At Ten Space, we have an “ethics” filter built into our platform, this allows us to protect anonymity to create a safe space for employees to share feedback, but also to drill down to identify additional insights.
Create an Action Plan
Once you’ve understood what the data is telling you, it’s time to create an action plan. This can often be split into “quick wins” and longer term action that may need more time and resources.
It’s also likely you’ll identify actions that apply across the whole organisation, or to specific teams and demographics.
It’s important to talk about engagement and action planning regularly. This keeps momentum going and keeps accountability for progress high.
Communicating to employees
Employees who have taken the time to complete a survey, will want to know what the outcomes are and what happens next.
There is often immediate messaging we can give to employees, to share findings and themes and what the key next steps are. This might be an organisational wide communication, where everyone receives the same message.
Think about the best channel to share this based on your population to maximise the impact.
In our experience this communication has the best impact when it comes from the leaders at the top of the organisation. Showing ownership and interest in employee feedback and making progress.
From there it might be that line managers speak with their teams and help them to understand the findings and impact on a local level. Helping employees understand the “so what” for them, helps them connect to the outcomes.
Do it Regularly
By surveying regularly, you stand a better chance of preventing problems that lead to poor culture and resignations as you are building up patterns and collecting regular data, at the moment it is happening.
Really getting to grips with employee feedback data can even help to predict issues before they arise.
Through anonymous feedback, your teams are given a voice and when they see action coming from their feedback, they know their voice is being heard.
Creating great processes & habits around employee feedback & actions will pay off. This will come through in both survey completion rates, engagement levels, healthy culture and ultimately employee retention.
Good luck with your next steps and actions!
At Ten Space, we help organisations understand what is driving, or holding back engagement in their teams. We do this through frequent, bespoke engagement surveys, designed to get to the heart of culture and engagement.
Start your journey to high engagement with us by getting in touch. Or check out how we’ve helped others create incredible workplaces in our case studies.
