You’ve completed a great survey, you’ve got tons of awesome feedback. But what do you do now? How do you make the most of your engagement data? It goes without saying that you should be taking action from each survey, but it can be easier said than done.
Capturing employee engagement data is essential to knowing how satisfied and motivated your team is at work. Motivated employees are more likely to perform better at their job, in fact, employees work 20% better when motivated. So checking in with your employees regularly via surveys will ensure you’re able to address issues as they arise and maintain an engaged workforce.
By not taking feedback seriously you risk losing valuable team members. Employees who don’t feel comfortable providing upward feedback are 16% less likely to stay in their organisation.
Tell a story with the data
You can help create extra insight from your results by sharing them effectively. It can help people connect with them and understand the action that they need to take next. It’s easy to get lost in the data - try not to! Consider key themes, quick wins and longer term big wins from each survey.
To get real value from the data that you’ve collected, you have to dig through it and discover where you need to make changes. You need to locate both the strengths and weaknesses within your business.
1.Look for patterns - Are there areas in which your organisation scored low across the board? This is an obvious place to start. Identifying failings that are affecting employee happiness is key to moving the needle.
2.Dissect the data - At an absolute minimum, you need to be able to segment the data by department. 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.
Create a plan & discuss
Once you’ve identified patterns and drawn conclusions, it’s time to talk to individuals one-on-one. Communication is at the heart of all successful businesses. It’s important to talk about engagement and action planning regularly.
Is there time at board / leadership / management meetings to track progress and keep employee engagement high on the agenda? Not just the first meeting after a survey, but every one. Continue to share actions and progress with wider employee groups & across the entire organisation. You can share the continual progress and show that you're keeping the conversation going.
For individual leaders, you may want to take the time to sit down with employees and discuss what’s keeping them engaged at work, and what (if anything) is holding them back. Give your employees structure, help them plan for the future, and act on what they tell you so you don’t lose their trust. Whilst were huge advocates for anonymous feedback, it’s only one part of ensuring employees have a voice in your organisation, talking to employees one to one is another powerful method.
It can take some time for your action plan to gain traction in your business. In fact, on average it takes more than 2 months before a new behaviour becomes automatic - 66 days to be exact. So being consistent with your action plan is the best way to get a new workplace habit to ‘stick’.
Use segmentation to explore your data
Using segmentation in your survey can be a powerful way to gain additional insight from your data. Knowing specific teams or demographics who are less engaged than others can help to highlight retention risk & drive specific actions.
You may find that there are key themes in smaller populations that emerge, which can have a huge impact on engagement overall when addressed. This can especially be true when addressing key themes for under-represented groups. It can have a positive impact on feelings of inclusion and belonging across the entire 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 Space HR, 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.
Survey regularly
Employees feeling left out or uninformed could be a huge barrier to engagement. This is something that you’ll be able to uncover through your data and that you should work on resolving. By surveying regularly, you stand a better chance of preventing problems that lead to resignations as you are building up patters and collecting regular data, in the moment it is happening.
By building up trends and themes over time, you can understand in great detail what employee engagement and culture is like in your organisation. 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 and engagement levels.
At Space HR we offer quarterly surveys which allow teams to share their honest feedback anonymously. This gives leaders the chance to listen to their team, understand the problems in the organisation and work on changing things for the better. We also provide tools which help you with reporting. These enable you to take the feedback to your leaders quickly and effectively.
We can help you check in on the engagement and wellbeing of your team through anonymous employee feedback. Check out how we can help at www.spacehr.co.uk.
