RSS feedsAfter many years of reducing costs and streamlining internally there is now a trend within companies towards trying to enhance employee delivery.
To achieve this you can’t just teach people to offer ‘service with a smile’ or tell employees to finish phone calls with a ubiquitous ‘have a nice day!’.
Employees need to genuinely care about their company to go that extra mile to make a genuine contribution. Business success can, therefore, be very dependant on successful employee engagement.
A key to raising employee engagement is for employers to find out exactly what employees want. Individual needs can be registered in appraisals, but this is not reflective of a collective culture. There are various ways that an organisation can fully listen to employees.
Get some feedback
You can sit with each employee over an informal coffee, organise focus groups with a cross selection of employees reflecting the thoughts of a greater mass, or conduct an internal survey. These surveys are typically conducted anonymously through a third party to allow for more honest feedback. These methods all allow you to take a temperature check to find out what employees are thinking.
It is vital when engaging in this type of activity that results turn into direct visible actions. If this is not the case, then surveys will create more ill will than goodwill. Detailed action planning by senior management is very important and an employer needs to be seen to be acting on results. This means that a survey should be an effective way of engaging employees with the firm.
Employees who are ‘on board’ are usually the ones who work harder and bring the full range of their creative potential to the workplace. They also stay with their organisation longer term.
In any business this is an important factor as it reduces training and recruitment costs for new employees. From the client side, it is also a bonus as clients like to feel secure with the people they deal with. If there is a high employee turnover rate, there is a lack of continuity.
A recent Towers Perrin Global Workforce study, based on responses from almost 90,000 respondents in 18 countries, showed that senior management has a greater impact on employee engagement than any local factors such as the relationship with immediate supervisors.
The strongest motivator in terms of encouraging employee engagement was ‘senior management’s sincere interest in employee well being’. An effective employee survey delivers a clear manifesto to senior management of what they should be looking to tackle and improve.
When collating the results that produce a specific theme then it may be worthwhile re-surveying the employees further down the line. This allows greater clarity to see if any of the actions taken to resolve difficulties were effective. Using focus groups may be easier for a quick ‘second run’, as less depth of insight is likely to be necessary.
Don’t overdo it
But there needs to be caution against overdoing surveys. An annual survey should allow time for changes to be implemented and results to be seen year on year.
Survey repetition beyond these levels could be taken as a sign that the initial survey was ineffective or seen as an indication that managers have not understood the issues previously highlighted.
A way to enhance employer and employee surveys comes when you incorporate them with a client listening programme. It is all well and good to listen to employees, but employers should also be listening to what their external clients are saying about them. There may be certain crossover on issues, and with a coordinated programme these suddenly take on a greater significance.
Clients complaining about delivery times, for instance, backed by employees complaining about inconsistent suppliers could be an indication of infrastructure problems that might be easy to cure.
Surveys are not a means of running a corporate democracy, but should be a highly beneficial business exercise that can help boost loyalty, staff retention and quality of service. All these factors raise employee engagement and hopefully, ultimately, benefit the bottom line.
Employee surveys
• Surveys can play an important role in engaging workers in the business
• It is important for a firm to know how employees feel and how they can be developed
• Survey results should be widely distributed and seen by all the relevant people
• Senior management need to be seen to be acting on results
• Good surveys need not be taken more than annually. Overdoing them can water down their effectiveness
• The ability to combine an employee survey with a client survey offers a clearer chance to improve overall corporate satisfaction, which should reflect on profitability
Daniel Kasmir is human resources director at BDO Stoy Hayward
