7 Ways Your Employee Engagement Survey can Help You Win the War for Top Talent (or Not)

As we move into the first quarter of 2019, the war for your top talent is well underway. Unemployment is below 5 percent. Employees have more options for who they want to work for, when they want to do the work, where they want to do the work and how they do their work than any time in history. The buzz on the streets from the HR world is: The gates are officially wide open. Which way will your employees run? As a leader, are you prepared to win the war for the top talent?

The good news is 2018 was a year when most industries experienced growth. The bad news is that it is harder to attract and retain great employees. Employee turnover can impact you with costs in recruiting, pre-departure costs, selection of new team members, onboarding, training and the overall loss of productivity. Some studies estimate the cost of replacing an employee can range from thousands of dollars to 1.5 to 2.0 times the cost of higher level leaders. While even the strongest organizations seldom have 100% retention, you have something in your talent management toolbox to help significantly reduce or prevent wandering eyes: an Employee Engagement Survey.

An Employee Engagement Survey will help you determine the EKG of the overall health of your organization. When morale is low, there is something called the contagion effect. This is when the culture gets so bad and the turnover rate is so high that it is impossible to continue to ignore the problem. You concede you are losing the talent war.

After 25 years of conducting Employee Engagement and Opinion Surveys for organizations, we are more convinced than ever that these surveys are critical tools in assessing the effectiveness of your leadership team and the health of your company. Organizations that administer a customized survey anonymously and then take action based on the results, most often tend to improve the culture of their organization.

But, it is important to acknowledge the thousands of employees and managers who believe the whole survey process is a big waste of time. And, it is important to note that we are in agreement with this group of people and how they think. In many organizations the Employee Opinion or Engagement Survey is a waste of everyone’s time and the organization’s money. Here are the top 7 reasons we have uncovered why Employee Surveys fail.

Senior Management is not in full support: Every human resource professional wants to make a difference in the organization by improving the culture and make the organization a place where employees love coming to work. But, if the CEO and senior leaders are not in full support of conducting a survey, it is destined to fail.

The survey is not customized. If you are going to ask employees to take their time to take the survey, you had better ask them about topics that are relevant. It is critical that pre-survey interviews are conducted so you know what questions to ask.

Break the data out for ownership: If you want your survey to fail, then just report back the overall organization’s data. When the data is not broken down by shift, department, or leader, it is impossible for anyone to take ownership. As long as there are five or more employees, you have enough to create a meaningful breakdown.

Do not act on the results. In every survey we do, there are some managers who do not even communicate back to employees their departmental or team results. Even worse, there are some managers who provide the departmental results, but then never create a plan of what actions they will take to improve the culture in their department.

Survey is not anonymous. When the surveys are conducted in-house, there is always a belief that someone knows how everyone answered the survey. Using a third-party administrator significantly improves the employee response rate.

Leadership does not listen: I have listened to hundreds of managers who look at the survey data for their department and then tell me how they know exactly why their scores are low. Instead of listening to understand, these leaders are more comfortable making assumptions of why employees responded the way they did.

Shoot the messenger: One manager was in stunned disbelief that his employees did not trust him. To confirm that these results had to be wrong, he called his team together and asked, “Who does not trust me?” and “What have I even done that makes you not trust me?” Sure enough, everyone in the meeting said, “Hey, we trust you. We thought the question was referring to other areas of management.”

It’s not just conducting the survey that will help you maximize your talent management system: it’s the insight that it can provide you with, and the subsequent actions you can, and must, take afterwards. Stay tuned for next week’s blog to learn more about the 7 things that will make your Employee Engagement Survey a success in managing the war for top talent.