How to Make Your Employee Engagement Survey Successful
At ACR Supply Company, we are extremely focused on creating a healthy work culture for our team members and their families. We understand that the workplace is where people will spend much of our time throughout our adult lives.
With this in mind, we work hard to make our work environment a place where people can thrive and grow in their areas of giftedness. Our desire is for people to wake up each day and truly want to come to work.
So, how do you know if you have a healthy work culture? The answer is simple – just ask your people and they will tell you.
Feedback, Feedback, and More Feedback
Ken Blanchard, bestselling author and speaker once said, “Feedback is the breakfast of champions.” I believe that this is incredibly true for all organizations and their leaders.
Without a system or process for getting feedback, it is very difficult for an organization to get a general pulse on how their people are feeling about their work environment. Some organizations handle this process internally, while others use external resources to gather feedback – ACR does both.
Each year, ACR participates in an employee engagement survey with the Best Christian Workplaces Institute (BCWI). Our team simply knows it as our “Culture Survey”. We also facilitate a quarterly “Values Survey” that is much smaller overall, but still provides us with regular feedback throughout the year.
We are very humbled and honored to say that every time we have participated in BWCI’s survey, ACR has been designated as a Certified Best Christian Workplace with a flourishing work culture.
Our leadership team believes that a flourishing work culture does not happen on accident, and our success is largely because we have strong desire to use our team’s feedback for continuous improvement within our organization.
ABCs for a Successful Engagement Survey
Anonymity
In order to get honest survey responses from your people, you must make sure that everyone understands and believes that the survey responses are anonymous. It is never a good thing when people feel that leadership can figure out who said what, or that there may be a “witch hunt” after the survey results have been revealed.
If possible, it is best to outsource the survey to a third-party organization that specializes in facilitating employee engagement surveys. This ensures that there is no ability for members of leadership to obtain individual survey responses and preserves the anonymity for your team.
Benchmarking
Another reason for using a third-party organization is that they can provide benchmarking data from other similar organizations. This allows you to compare your engagement results to others and see how you stack up.
If you notice that your engagement scores are not up to par with your peers in industry, it might be a good indicator that you are more susceptible to having good people leave your company – or not-so-good people stay. On the other side of the coin, you have very strong chance of retaining your top performers if your scores are higher than the competition.
Change & Communicate
Perhaps, most importantly, the feedback that you receive from the survey needs to drive change. Your team needs to see that leadership is using the engagement survey as a tool for improvement. When changes are made as a result, people feel like their voices are heard and their opinions are valued.
It’s also important to know, in most cases, it isn’t possible or realistic for an organization to address every issue or suggestion that arises on a survey. That’s ok. Communicate the major issues that are being tackled, and also communicate the “why” behind feedback that cannot be addressed at this time.
More and more employers are realizing that a paycheck alone is not enough to retain top talent in today’s world. Organizations need to create workplaces where people can perform at their peak without dysfunctional behavior getting in the way. People need a forum to share ideas and voice concerns. The best performers expect leadership to listen and take action.
Ultimately, if you want to identify ways to improve your organization and retain the best people – it starts with a survey.