Recognise This! – Little is more likely to decrease employee engagement than an engagement survey with no action.
I’ve written before that engagement surveys in themselves are a useless exercise unless management is committed to follow through and take action on what the survey reveals.
Research backs this up. Reported in Strategy + Business, research from the Netherlands found:
“But this study finds that there’s a consequence to giving employees a voice: A company then has to listen. If employees conclude that a manager is just trying to win points by paying lip service to consulting them — and has no intention of acting on their advice — they are likely to stop offering input and, worse, act out their frustration by clashing with their colleagues. …
“Conversely, employees who thought their manager was indeed paying attention spoke up more often and got along better with one another, improving the organisation’s functioning as a whole.”
What does that translate to in terms of employee engagement? Recent research from Aon Hewitt discussed in HR Magazine gives us a hint:
“Aon Hewitt’s research confirmed organisations with a strong engagement culture were much more successful at transforming employee surveys into actions. For example, managers who reviewed their survey results and identified actions had an overall engagement score of 63%, versus 27% for managers who had access to results but did not even review them.”
3 questions for you today:
- Do you conduct employee engagement or employee satisfaction surveys?
- How do you analyze the results?
- What do you do with the information employees give? What actions are taken?
