Organizations strive to measure the impact of engaged employees on business results. Intuitively, it is that simple and easy to say that engaged employees cost less and produce more. Many studies and reports support this assumption, companies with engaged employees have stronger levels of profitability and employee retention.
So why do most organizations struggle to measure this impact? Mostly because of the process. Here's how an employee engagement survey process is (unfortunately) mismanaged in many organizations:
-An organization conducts an employee engagement survey.
-The results are presented to the executive team.
-Executive team question: "How does this relate to our business results?" (ask yourself out loud in your CFO voice)
-HR team struggles to find data and metrics to make comparisons.
-The HR team realizes that the process is not designed to make effective comparisons.
-There are no comparisons that can be shared.
It is certainly not the best return on your investment in the survey. There are many reasons why it is difficult to compare business metrics to "employee engagement" survey data. Let's look at the following four steps to overcome these challenges and compare your business results to employee engagement:
1-Collect Data by Grouping
To provide a good internal comparison, you need to look at the variability in engagement scores across groups in the organization (locations, departments, managers, etc.). This is done by asking demographic questions in the survey or coding the groupings in the backend. If you can only see an overall company score, don't bother with comparisons.
2-Decide What to Measure
Find out what data is important for your organization. This could include: profitability, turnover, sales, customer service or productivity data. Make sure you have data that can be compared across groups. Ask yourself, "What do we really want to know? What is the most important thing for us to understand?" Identify which factors have an impact on the results. Decide what information needs to be collected to correlate survey responses with results. If you suddenly have a high level of attrition in a particular section, measure the factors that are related to attrition. I think you get the point. Remember. A standard plug-and-play type of survey rarely measures the items that are most critical to your organization.
3-Measure Employee Engagement Accurately
Many organizations equate overall employee engagement with the sum of all questions in a survey. In other words, they take the average score from questions on pay, meaning, leadership, communication and safety and call it an "employee engagement score". This is dangerous to do. This is not employee engagement. While some questions in a survey are nice to know, they are not really about engagement. Do not measure engagement using the average score of all survey questions. You also don't want to measure engagement based on a single survey question. Instead, use only the total score of 5 or 6 key questions that measure engagement.
4-Analyze External Variables and Factors Correctly
Now that you have measured engagement accurately and have the groups you need to compare, make sure you analyze the external variables that can influence the results. This may not always be possible as we are constantly faced with external factors that can influence engagement. The point is that it is important to understand these factors. Have there been recent layoffs at a site? Has a group's manager changed in the last 3 months? If so, consider these factors when making comparisons.
When you effectively prepare your employee engagement survey process in advance of the process, rather than after the survey is conducted, you can gain the support of the executive team, drive changes in the organization, and make strong comparisons to business results. Do you have more to add to the list? Please share your experiences with me in the comments section.
EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT SAMPLE SURVEY