Believe it or not, employee surveys can generate excitement in organisations! And so they should – it is after all an opportunity to improve your work life and have your say. I was inspired to write this post after receiving some feedback by an employee taking part in a survey.
It’s not uncommon for us to receive a ‘thank you’ or an ‘I’ve completed the survey’ email reply to invitations or reminders. Sometimes people even discuss the employee opinion survey in their free comments such as – ‘can we do more frequent surveys?’ ‘Thank you for commissioning this survey’. But one employee was so happy with the survey he received; he went out of his way to give me his opinion. Here’s just a snippet:
‘One of the best surveys I have ever completed!’
Why be positive about employee surveys?
This is great to hear, but why is it surprising? What was so special about their survey? The feedback just shows that with a little … read more »
Latest employee engagement figures from CIPD do not make great reading
The latest report from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (Winter 2012/13) shows that 35% of employees are engaged but the majority (61%) remain neutral. 4% of respondents are disengaged.
In comparison to twelve months ago there is a very slight downward change, 36%, 60% and 3% respectively.
The summer of 2012 offered the high point in terms of overall employee engagement at 39% (with just 3% disengaged) but we now find that scores are now inline with Winter 11/12.
The highlights (although not at all surprising) of the latest report are that micro organisations (between 2 and 9 employees) have typically higher levels of engagement as opposed to large organisations (more than 250 employees) – 60% compared with 31%. Although small organisations (between 10 and 49 employees) have the highest level of disengaged employees at 6% compared with 1% for micro and 5% for large businesses.
The extent … read more »
When working with one of our clients we developed a colourful way of representing the proportion of promoters within their organisation and this got me to thinking, could you guess the proportion of those who would strongly recommend your organisation to others? Hence, what colour would your organisation be?
I would like to think that our organisation would be mostly green – full of happy engaged employees recommending our organisation to everyone they came into contact with.
I am sure you agree; everyone would like to think that employees within their organisation would recommend it as a good place to work. Employee promoters encourage strong growth in business performance because they provide a better customer experience. Those who approach the job with energy, enhance productivity, and come up with innovative and creative ideas for improvements to processes, products and services.
As a business leader, you have good reason to want to earn the enthusiastic loyalty of your staff. But research has shown that, … read more »
The emphasis on how HR uses information has become much more strategic and in this economic climate the use of information may form the distinction between the organisational winners and losers. Does your employee survey stack up?
Data should provide insight not just information
Nick Kemsley in Personnel Today discusses how it has become more important for HR to use data to provide insight rather than just information, how it needs to relate to business impact rather than process and how HR must become more comfortable using less precise macro-level or trend data. The competitive advantage to those organisations embracing this shift in mindset should surely leave them better placed to weather the changing economy.
Feedback from employees, and in particular outputs from feedback tools such as employee surveys, needs to be incorporated into the business strategy and the information used to inform and drive it.
Does your employee survey deliver?
In light of this you … read more »
Whilst reading some recent articles around employee engagement, I came across a paragraph from Linda Dulye, who has written an article on Fox Business.
“In the end, engaging employees to give their best starts with top bosses sharing the game plan, followed by managers ensuring great two-way communication. After that, empower associates to partner in solving business challenges, then demonstrate sincere appreciation and stay on track through continuous measurement and improvement.”
I think this paragraph wonderfully captures the simple essence of employee engagement.
Now, I know there will be many people who think/ voice the fact that employee engagement is complicated, that there are many factors that will affect someone’s likelihood of being an engaged employee. Indeed, this is somewhat the case – although in actuality many of those factors are outside the control and scope of an organisation.
The fact remains however, that if you look at the many different views, opinions and research on employee engagement a lot appear to over complicate, … read more »
