You’ve set up and distributed a survey, but you don’t know what to do with your employee engagement survey results next. And it’s often the most off-putting step in the journey to improving employee engagement and company culture. With reams of data to analyse, reports to create, conclusions to draw and actions to put into place it can be overwhelming.
But it doesn’t have to be. Read on to discover exactly what to do with your employee engagement survey results.
Immediately communicate
The first step post-survey is to communicate with all employees, ensuring you’ve thanked them for taking part. Your people will feel more positive about participating and valued in their contributions towards creating a more engaged company culture.
If you can, provide some top-level headlines from the survey, such as a comparison to their previous engagement score (which has hopefully improved), or reference some positive feedback from your people.
Reassure employees that you’ll be taking quick steps to create an action plan in each department, team or even at an individual level. Your employees will feel engaged and secure knowing that they can expect meaningful feedback and action soon.
How to interpret employee engagement survey results
How to interpret employee engagement survey resultsIdeally each manager, director and department head should get instant access to the survey results and feedback. Acting quickly is essential. Too much time spent crunching the data and drawing conclusions means your data is becoming outdated and, therefore, less valuable.
Getting to grips with the immediate issues that need to be addressed is of paramount importance, so it is always best to use a system that will do it for you instantly, and automatically.
Using a standard way to measure your employee engagement survey results will help you get to grips with the data quickly. For example, WeThrive measures on a “never” to “always” time-scale, with questions such as “how often do you have the necessary headspace to reflect and think clearly?”
Each manager will need to spend some time considering the employee engagement survey results and prioritising each action. However, the sooner your managers can start talking to their teams and turning feedback into action, the sooner your employees’ stresses and engagement blockers can be relieved.
The fastest way to do this is with WeThrive. Instead of wondering what to do with your employee engagement survey results, WeThrive will automatically crunch the data, create a report at each level of the organisation and provide managers with a personal list of prioritised actions and recommendations for improvement.
Track progress
Whichever way you choose to survey your employees and present feedback make sure you have a plan in place to track what happens next. To make something happen it’s useful to agree on specific outcomes rather than a general plan.
Agree in advance:
- Who is going to do what, where, and with what materials?
- How are they going to do it, and by when?
- How will you help them know why they are doing it?
- How will everyone know if it is complete, or if more needs doing?
Use your employee engagement survey results to set achievable goals
When putting together an action plan (or reviewing WeThrive’s instantly generated action plan) managers should set achievable goals for improving each area. For example, if you know that 52% of the time your customer service team don’t have time to clear their head and feel they have to keep going, what small steps can you take to fix this?
WeThrive would tell your manager:
- Run a weekly planning meeting with the whole team, ensure workloads are equal
- Start each 1:1 with the question, ‘How are you doing’ then keep quiet and listen for the response
- At team meetings share your own issues with clearing your head & creating time to think, advocacy of mental health issues at a management level is powerful in driving change
Once recommendations have been reviewed, managers can simply select the relevant recommendations and set personal goals.
Repeat
After continuously working through the suggested changes highlighted in your employee engagement survey results it is time to repeat the cycle. Every organisation works on a different timeline, but 3-4 company wide engagement surveys per year should ensure employees are constantly supported by managers to feel engaged, happy and productive.
However, with WeThrive employees can run unlimited individual surveys, or managers can distribute team-based employee engagement surveys whenever they feel the need.
Key considerations when reviewing your employee engagement survey results
Avoiding bias
If you’re considering designing your own survey and analysing the results in-house it is vital to avoid human error and potential bias. It is damaging and unhelpful to unintentionally misinterpret survey results, but all too common when analysed by someone within the organisation.
A platform that can crunch the numbers, analyse the results and provide an instant report filled with ready-to-use actions plans free from bias is key to telling you exactly what to do with your employee engagement survey results.
Limit your feedback
Don’t go overboard when creating an action plan. Select 6-7 of the most important areas for each manager or department head to focus on. It is far better to do a thorough job improving employee engagement in the worst affected areas than to do a mediocre job covering all areas of feedback.
WeThrive highlights the top 6 areas to focus on, identifying exactly how many people need support providing 4-6 recommendations for change in each area.
Benchmark where possible
How do you know what good looks like? Benchmarking can be a helpful tool for identifying where you are and where you want to be.
At WeThrive, an average overall engagement score of 80% means your people have what they need to perform well 4 out of 5 days a week. But is that the average in your industry? Understanding how your employee engagement survey results compare to others provides a strong indication as to how effective your people strategy is.
WeThrive’s benchmarking data can help you do just that. Compare by the average engagement scores over all accounts, or specifically in your industry.
Get 10 free users today
WeThrive allows you to build your own custom account. From as low as £1 per person per month, you can start improving employee engagement, plus get your first 10 employees free forever.
Sign up today to get 10 users free or try a 2 minute demo to see the survey for yourself.
