Employee engagement has fluctuated throughout the global pandemic, setting record highs twice last year before settling back to pre-pandemic levels by autumn 2020, Gallup research found.
It’s in volatile situations like this where it becomes especially important to regularly check in with your team. “The best time to do a survey is when the organization is under stress,” Salvatore Falletta, Ed.D, GPHR, Professor and Program Director for Human Resource Development at Drexel University, said at a recent Alchemizing HR webinar.
Here’s how employee engagement surveys can be put to good use at your organization.
You can’t measure something you can’t define. Although HR researchers are still debating how to define employee engagement, you can select one definition and measure for that. Through his research, Falletta has published his definition: “Employee engagement involves the cognitive, emotional and behavioral relationship employees have with their jobs and organizations, and the effort and enthusiasm they put into their daily work.”
Employee engagement touches on employee thought processes, emotions associated with their jobs and their behaviors in the workplace. It includes components like job satisfaction, motivation, sense of purpose and job involvement. Measure for more definable factors like these to draw conclusions regarding engagement in your workforce.
Organizations tend to focus on some key drivers of engagement over others. Falletta refers to these as “the usual suspects,” and they include items like personal relationships with managers, trust and integrity, and the nature of the job. But these items don’t motivate everyone at your organization, so avoid a one-size-fits-all approach to driving engagement. Use data analysis to divide your workforce into specific employee groups.
“It’s critically important to segment your talent [and] identify what matters most in terms of employee value propositions by each critical talent segment in your organization,” Falletta says.
Find what motivates your top talent — the people you need to maintain and train for succession. In one survey, Falletta found that high-potential talent was more driven by leadership opportunities than the usual suspects.
The type of employee engagement surveys you run and how you conduct them depends on your workplace culture. Pulse surveys are useful for items that you can act on immediately, such as, “Did your manager give you feedback this week?” Don’t overdo pulse surveys, as your workforce may develop survey fatigue. And if you’re surveying employees on something you can address, be sure to take action, or you’ll lose trust.
Annual surveys work better for items that are sensitive or need lag time for strategic development, such as benefit offerings and leadership development opportunities. With these, too, you have to act on what employees reveal in their survey results. If you don’t, employees will be much less likely to respond to the survey next year.
You can conduct the survey on your own through services like Qualtrics or SurveyMonkey or, if you have the resources, you can outsource the survey. The option you select mainly depends on your workplace culture. “If you have a culture that’s concerned about individual anonymity and confidentiality, it might make more sense for you to use a third-party consulting firm that does large-scale strategic surveys,” Falletta says.
Watch the recording for recertification credit.