How to Decide on the Best Course of Action Based on the Results ofYour Employee Engagement Survey
Planning action is always a good idea. But that doesn't mean that every action plan is good. An organization can create all the awareness in the world, but just as the bathroom scale reminds me every morning, awareness alone is not enough. To develop a clear action plan towards an effective behavioral change, it is necessary to have an accurate understanding of what is happening behind the scenes.
A few years ago, a well-known national brand came to us. They had a number of widely publicized challenges and wanted to conduct an employee engagement survey to gain insight into how these challenges were impacting employees. As expected, their results were below average. What no one expected, however, was that people's negative response to one of the survey sections on training and development opportunities was at a record low. It was actually the lowest score we've ever seen for a survey item in the employee engagement survey. Something had to change and it had to happen fast.
The action plan for this organization was clear as day. Consulting is easy when the answers are so clearly articulated. Processing statistics was just a formality at this point. Until we realized this was not the case. According to our factor analysis of the drivers of employee engagement, the surprisingly negative response to one question was not actually a driver of engagement. Upon closer inspection, we realized that the real driver was actually something that was hiding behind 40% of the questions - an item that was relatively low, but not so low that no one thought about it. With this knowledge, we had to convince our client to pay attention to what was going on in the background, not what was in plain sight. And for the benefit of the company, they listened.
Every employee engagement survey has two main decisions. The first is "do we need to do the survey?" (this is the easy one - the correct answer is yes 90% of the time). The second is "what now?". We have results, but what exactly do they mean and what do we do with them? Think of how an ophthalmologist tries a series of lenses in sequence until what you are looking at goes from hazy to clearly in focus. Likewise, to create a clear action plan, you need to filter the data through 3 action plan lenses.
LENS 1 - STATISTICAL ANALYSIS
The first and most important step in developing an employee engagement survey action plan is to determine which pathways to choose to have the greatest impact on employee engagement. Each of these pathways can be categorized into "good, better and best" according to increasing degrees of effectiveness.
Good Statistical significance. This is the most basic statistical test you can do, and really the minimum you should do once your results are in. You check the average of your data against another average (e.g. your previous data or an industry benchmark) and you can decide whether the difference is likely to be real or just due to chance. But the problem is that this is all it can show you. It doesn't tell you whether it's the best place to prioritize your actions.
It's better than that: Correlation. It is certainly a relevant perspective on the importance test. Which items go up as Employee Engagement goes up? When do they go down in concert? The relationship here is obvious. But you run the risk of spurious correlation, among other things. A useful example I use when I talk statistics: The more cars in a city, the more accidents there are. But it turns out that this correlation is misleading because the probability of accidents can also be explained by a third variable: the population of a city. Therefore, the main finding is that the more people there are in an area, the more likely it is to see an increase in accidents. So, even if the correlation lens is useful and certainly provides direction, it also carries the possibility of misdirection.
Best practice: When determining the action plan and laying out your employee engagement strategy, the best method is to conduct a factor analysis (multiple regression). This is like a correlation on steroids. It scans and eliminates all the spurious correlations and presents you with a handful of items that best predict employee engagement. Using this lens provides the clearest and most reliable path. But these employee engagement statistics are only the first step.
LENS 2 - LOWEST SCORES
Congratulations, you have discovered the preliminary indicators of employee engagement through the science of statistics, but do you need to dig further into the data you have? Not if your only goal is to directly address the factors that influence employee engagement. However, imagine if you said to your employees: "In the survey responses, you said that communication from the top down in our company (from the CEO down to the bottom) is very poor, but our statisticians' analysis revealed that there are more important aspects of employee engagement than this finding, so we have decided to treat the negative aspect of communication as a secondary issue for now." Would this make your employees feel listened to? Or valued. Or conversely, would it make them feel that completing the survey was a complete waste of their time? Perhaps they might see this approach as a disrespect or violation of their expectation to be heard. In summary, high and low scores are the most powerful messages your employees send you. If you ignore them, you are adding an unnecessary level of complexity to your engagement building campaign. And even worse, you will have lost any goodwill at the very beginning of the campaign and will no longer have a chance to spread the culture.
As I mentioned earlier, your first step is to use the lens of statistical data to define your action plan. The second step is to get employees to trust this plan. Making an effort to address low scores is an effective way to build trust. When you explain the status of the survey results, changes and initiatives, use the second lens on low scores to strengthen communication with employees and show that you are listening and hearing them.
A checklist on paper is better than your doctor for preliminary diagnosis of diseases. Believe me, humble checklists perform much better than doctors. So when you consult a doctor, you first go through checklists that are appropriate for your type of ailment. However, once the checklist has reached a conclusion, doctors use their intuition to diagnose and their experience is invaluable at this stage. Similarly, conclusions reached through the first two lenses need a final check for common sense. Maybe there is a problem with senior leadership, but the real reason is that retirement is imminent. Or maybe the lack of office space is having a negative impact on people's psychology. Or, going back to our original case study, maybe that lowest scoring issue is negatively impacting a very critical engagement driver.
Ultimately, our client in this case decided to focus heavily on their driver points. It was this third lens of intuition that gave our client the confidence to make this decision. By taking the lowest scores in the second lens approach, they recognized how bad the situation was. They showed that they heard their employees on this point. But they explained that the market conditions that year prevented them from taking on this issue, but that they were investing heavily in other areas designed to improve employee engagement - better communication, the development of organizational culture and a better sense of belonging. Hearing employees' voices and validating them on their feedback enabled them to gain and maintain the trust they needed to drive their employee engagement campaign.
By the time of the survey the following year, employee engagement had improved dramatically (they were our top improving customer that year.) And it wasn't just employee engagement that had improved. Usually, I tell clients that if an item increases by 7%, they should throw a party. What happened to that abnormally low survey item, the one we had barely convinced them to work on? It increased by almost 250%! Employee engagement is the rising tide that lifts all boats, so when you love your job you can more easily overlook its flaws. Using these three lenses of action planning is the most effective way to create an effective employee engagement action plan. I would be grateful if you could share in the comments section below what other points you consider in your action planning.