How to Better Ensure Employee Buy-in for Engagement Surveys

Sometimes the most obvious participants in an employee engagement initiative are left out of the picture. So that you are not left with a serious hole in your employee engagement initiative, include employees from the very start of your survey planning and launch.

Employee commitment to your employee engagement survey is not just about the number of employees who participate. Filling out a questionnaire is only a task. If you want your engagement plans to succeed, you must gain the hearts and minds of your employees…not just their ratings to engagement questions. And to earn their full-fledged commitment to the process, you need to begin at the beginning.  Based upon over 5,000 employee engagement training sessions per year: 

1. Make sure that the employee engagement survey is easy to take and relevant to your unique business need-to-know. In general, no survey should take more than 15-20 minutes. It should be readily accessed by all employees whether online or in paper form. And, if your employees speak multiple languages, be sure the survey is available in the languages represented.

2. The announcement of the survey and an invitation to participate should come from the highest level. You want everyone to understand that this assessment is an important part of the leadership’s plan for the company’s future well-being. This is the time to explain the purpose of the survey, to emphasize that all responses will be kept confidential, to commit to reporting back on the results and to promise that there will be appropriate actions taken when the results are known.

3. Maintain a flow of updates on the survey process. Managers should continue to encourage participation, the percentages of those surveys returned should be reported regularly, and a push toward 100% participation should escalate as the deadline for completing the forms nears.

4. As soon as the leadership team has reviewed the results and determined what critical few actions should be taken, they should communicate at a high level with the employee population at large and in more detail with the organization’s various department heads. This is not a time to cover up the negatives that were revealed. After all, the point of the survey was to figure out what was not working and what could be improved for better employee advocacy, discretionary effort and retention. Celebrate what is going well and identify meaningful and implementable steps to improve the most important drivers of engagement. Summarize both the company-wide positives and the negatives. Specific actions should then be discussed and committed to at the department level with executive approval.

5. Include employees in the departmental meetings where actions will be considered and specific action steps outlined. The more employees are involved at this point, the more they will feel ownership of the improvement process.  Remember, half the battle is having employees feel that you value them as your most important asset.

In your zeal to begin the process of improving employee engagement, do not neglect to get your employees in on the process…from beginning to end with an explicit commitment from the executive team to decisively and visibly act upon the employee engagement survey results.  Done right, you should have employees who:

• Are committed and emotionally connected
• Go out of their way to over-achieve
• Actively promote your business
• Stay with you during good times and bad

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