7 Ways Your Employee Engagement Survey Can Help You Win the War for Top Talent (or Not) – Part 2

In last week’s blog, we addressed 7 reasons your Employee Engagement and Opinion Surveys can be a waste of time and fail to bring about positive changes in your organizational culture and help you win the war for top talent. This week, we bring you 7 actions you can take to make the most of the insight you gain from your survey and put it to work to maximize your talent management system.

1. Identify the weak links. People don’t quit their company. Instead, they quit their supervisor; typically citing incompatibility or dissatisfaction with their boss as the reason for leaving their job. Using the survey data to identify leaders who are at risk will allow you to provide training/coaching to help the leader identify employee concerns and improve the overall working environment. In your Employee Engagement Survey, employees rate their direct supervisor’s leadership skills, providing you with a mini report card on each leader. This makes it easy to quickly identify those leaders in need of help, and those who have a solid, effective working relationship with their team members.
2. Hold leaders accountable for improvements. Sometimes employees indicate on their exit interviews that nothing ever changes. When a leader is in trouble, it’s easy to make an action plan. But to truly know if the leader’s improving or just giving lip service, you need quantifiable data. Your Employee Engagement Survey gives you just that: data from everyone involved on how the leader and team is improving, or not.
3. Measure employee’s connection to the organization. We have found that there is a strong link between an employee’s faith in the organization and how well they are connected with the organization’s goals and future direction. If employees feel they don’t know where the company is headed, it will be hard to be motivated to help the company get there. Without understanding how their work matters within the organization, employees can lose hope. Your Employee Engagement Survey will provide the company with a great opportunity to further share and reinforce the vision and help identify which departments or teams need to be reconnected to the company’s vision.
4. Identify training and growth opportunities. For most organizations in this tough economy, opportunities for advancement are slim. To keep employees engaged, organizations need to provide them with opportunities to learn new skills and grow technically. Adding questions about personal growth and development to your Employee Engagement Survey will help you identify employees’ perceptions about opportunities for growth within their current positions.
5. Get a read on recognition and morale. Employees thrive on regular, on-going feedback, and feeling that they’re valued by their organization and leader. While performance reviews are good, they’re usually only completed once a year. In order to stay motivated and engaged, employees need positive reinforcements much more often than a performance review can offer. When you examine your Employee Engagement Survey results, you’ll be able to identify areas where recognition and motivation may be lacking. Motivation (and, more worrisome, de-motivation) spreads like wildfire. Once an employee’s motivation starts to drop, it can be contagious. Identifying these pockets on your Employee Engagement Survey can help contain the flames.
6. Attract new talent. Your Employee Engagement Survey can help you not only retain the talent you currently have by improving your corporate culture, but attract new talent as well. Employees that love their job are usually not shy about spreading a positive word about your organization. This is the best buzz a company can have for recruiting. This is one of the reasons we created our Award for Workplace Excellence, as it allows employers to proudly display their accomplishment on their websites, marketing materials, and to use as a resource when recruiting.
7. Ensure statements you ask are actionable. Another important feature of a good Employee Engagement Survey is that the results must be actionable. This cannot be accomplished with a Gallup-style 12 question survey. There is no doubt that engagement can be measured with just 12 questions, but the results will leave you with more questions than answers. It is important to not only understand whether employees are engaged or disengaged, but also what is specifically driving employee engagement or disengagement. In order to understand these drivers, an employee survey needs to explore a broad range of specific, actionable issues related to engagement

Incorporating your Employee Engagement Survey into your Talent Management System will help you identify your organization’s strengths, as well as, bring your attention to the areas in need of help and additional resources. You can manage your talent through a variety of ways, but having quantifiable data to measure how you are progressing will mean the difference between merely having a program in place and conducting a successful program with measurable improvements.