How to Make the Most of Your Employee Engagement Survey

After you have made the considerable investment in implementing an employee engagement survey, don’t make the unfortunately common mistake of stopping there. Remember from your employee engagement training that you have raised the expectations of your work force. Employees participated in the assessment in good faith and now you must visibly take your next steps in good faith.

Interpret the drivers of employee engagement results so you know what needs to be done and then do it throughout the entire organization. Leverage what you have learned about the engagement health of your organization so you reap all the benefits of the investment you have made. Communicate high level results, discuss the implications in open forums with individual teams, and decide upon the few critical moves that will make the most difference to the business in terms of employee advocacy, discretionary effort and retention.

Meantime, one very powerful way to “tell the story” of the value of the survey is to take a page from the sales training book. The best salespeople have a ready collection of success stories that, when used judiciously and in relevant sales situations, bolster their clarity and credibility with clients. Why don’t you put together a story of the success of the survey? One that is compelling and informative. With permission, use photos or comments that make the story more personal and specific. This is the way to increase the employee engagement story’s impact.

Here are some angles that can help you tell the employee engagement story:

1. Identify the team with the highest scores overall. Share what the employees like most about working on their team and try to highlight what they do differently that makes them so successful in terms of employee advocacy, performance and employee retention.

2. Identify a team that seemed to learn the most from the survey and worked the hardest to improve their team’s engagement. Ask if they are willing to share what they learned. How did they handle their challenges? Did everyone agree with the assessment results? Was everyone willing to make the changes to improve? What worked best for them?

3. Identify a team with the highest scores on a particular survey item. Did this tally with their own feelings about the team’s strength? How are they going to continue to leverage this strength?  What can others learn from their success?

4. Describe a team with some significant challenges. Use terms that are encouraging, not derogatory. What improvement area do they intend to focus on? What steps are they taking as a group?  What sort of help do they need?  How can others avoid a similar situation?

Cite specific examples of how the engagement survey has been used to improve employee and team performance. The narratives will give you the chance to make results public and to show how committed you are to making employee engagement a critical measure of the organization’s success.

Learn more at: http://www.lsaglobal.com/leading-for-employee-engagement/