4Cs Blog: Happy Employees = Happy Customers

(Showing all posts labeled Employee Surveys)

The 4Cs Action Planning Workbook: How to Turn Your Employee Survey Results Into Lasting Change

"SOCQ" It to Your Action Planning

The 5 Questions You Need To Ask In Your Employee Survey

If you are doing any kind of employee survey, these are the critical questions you need to ask. More importantly, these are the target scores you should be aiming for. If you are close to or above the target scores below, congratulations, you have a highly engaged workforce with outstanding levels of overall satisfaction. You’re doing really well.

If, on the other hand, you’re below the average scores, then it’s almost certain that you have an engagement problem that’s affecting your organization’s productivity, customer service, turnover rates and, ultimately, your bottom line.

So how would your organization score on these 5 questions?

• How much do you agree or disagree that the work you do is enjoyable?
• How satisfied are you with the level of reward and recognition at your organization?
• How satisfied are you with acknowledgement of your work by others at your organization?
• How satisfied are you with your opportunity to make suggestions and be involved in your work?
• How satisfied are you with your ongoing opportunities to learn new skills and grow?

What is the ROI from employee engagement?

We often hear from new HR managers who are enthusiastic about the opportunity to implement employee engagement survey programs in their organizations but have a hard time convincing senior management of the value they can bring vs. the cost of conducting surveys and doing the necessary follow-up to bring about change. HR is often on the losing side of the conversation and that's a real shame.

It's a ridiculously short-sighted management decision to ignore the potential benefits of measuring and increasing engagement and we'd like to show you why.

Here's a round-up of some of the statistics from studies conducted around the globe. The truth is, employee engagement programs should NOT be considered an unnecessary or frivolous expense. They are, in fact, an investment. And if done right, they are an investment with very healthy returns. 

Top Reasons You Have a Turnover Headache

High turnover is a symptom your employees are struggling. Exactly what they are struggling with may be apparent or it may be a complete mystery. Either way, in order to even begin to address turnover, you have to know what is causing employees to leave.

The top 7 reasons that are most commonly identified in our employee research are:

1. Employees have more work than they can manage. They are simply worked to the bone.

2. Some employees are treated better than others. When one employee is allowed to work from home one day a week and no one else is, resentment is inevitable.

3. Employees don't usually work just for the money, but they do care they are being paid fairly. If they aren't, they will leave if a better opportunity comes along.

4. Work culture is strongly correlated with employee engagement and happiness, and research has proven over and over that employees don't work well in toxic cultures.

5. A bad boss drives good people away. People today expect to have a great manager.

How Employee Surveys Can Predict Your Turnover Rate

Can An Employee Survey Predict Your Turnover?

With the right questions and the right analysis, absolutely yes. Insightlink's Loyalty Matrix reporting can show you. 

Knowing how many of your employees are likely to quit in near future (and what is causing their unhapiness with the job) can be an invaluable tool in helping to reduce expensive employee turover. 

Using our Loyalty Matrix analysis we can segment your employee population into four distinct groups. 

Take a short demo survey here to learn how.

What Are The Main Drivers Of Job Satisfaction In The U.S.?

AKA What Makes American Workers Happy?

Each year since 2001 we have conducted an annual survey of the American and Canadian workforce. In total, we have collected employee satisfaction data from more than 30,000 workers across many industries. From this very large sample we run a drivers analysis to find out exactly what it is that motivates employees and leads to higher levels of job satisfaction.  Here are the results:

Traditional Employee Surveys are Still the Gold Standard

When it comes to employee surveys, a common question from prospective clients is ‘How often should I survey my employees?’ It used to be organizations relied on an annual employee survey to collect feedback but in our world today, big data platforms embrace micro-surveys on every topic imaginable including where bet we work. Ever since employee engagement became a buzzword, employee surveys have moved from being an annual event to a sometimes weekly and even daily event.. Do we ever get tired of surveys? You bet we do!

Yes, Anonymity is VERY Important for Employee Surveys

One of the most common questions we get at Insightlink when talking with prospective clients is: "How do you guarantee anonymity for our employees?". We have a well-defined policy for doing that and we take that responsibility very, very seriously. You might think that every company would take the anonymity of employee surveys just as seriously as we do (and trust us, employees certainly do) but recent experience would suggest otherwise. Our Operations VP just published a LinkedIN article on the topic here. It's well worth a read.

DIY survey tools have opened up a whole new world when it comes to survey technology, but the one thing they cannot do is protect a person's identity the way a 3rd party provider can. If HR and management have the keys to the survey, then they can access every response and know exactly who said what. Your employees are not stupid. They know that. And if they know that, they won't be 100% honest. 

Do yourself a favor. A 3rd party provider may cost a bit more than doing it yourself in-house, but the benefits of expertise and the critical requirement of anonymity is well worth the few extra dollars you might pay.

Ways to Guarantee a Meaningful Employee Engagement Survey

Get Senior Management "buy-in"

It's critical to get management on board for any employee survey. If not, the risk is that nothing will be done with the results and employees will feel cheated; after all if they they were asked for their opinions and nothing changes, then what was the point? That feeling of being ignored is worse than not doing a survey in the first place. There's a tremendous amount of data on how organizations with high levels of employee engagement and satisfaction outperform their competitors financially, so there is a huge incentive for senior management to consider assessing the level of engagement in their own employees. 

Can’t convince your senior management to do a survey? Maybe they don’t realize that your employees’ ideas can result in cost savings and can improve your bottom line.

Reasons Not To Blow Off Your Next Employee Survey

When you take an employee survey the expectation is that something is going to change and it will be for the better. But what if the changes don’t stick or just fail to make any real difference for employees? If senior management did not respond the first time, the survey won’t have much credibility if it runs a second time. But a second chance still matters because it is one more valuable chance to get employee voices heard so it is critical employees don’t blow it off.

Reasons employees will blow off a survey are varied. In our experience the most common reason is employees are worried they will rock the boat or there will be consequences if a manager finds out what their employee said about them. Fear exists in some workplaces so it is important that employee surveys - at least the data collection part - be managed by an independent third party. We know that there are plenty of "free" or low cost survey tools available that you can use to collect employee data internally. However, protecting employee anonymity - both in reality and in the eyes of your employees - is absolutely essential if you want to achieve the highest possible participation and if you're determined to get honest and reliable answers. Read how we guarantee anonymity here and why we believe it is a vital part of employee research.

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