Benefits and Compensation

6 Reasons to Conduct an Employee Engagement Survey

Benowitz, who is the vice president of Growth and Development at The Employee Engagement Group, offered his expert tips on engagement surveys in a recent webcast offered by BLR.

Six Reasons to Conduct an Employee Engagement Survey

  1. Demonstrate your concern about employee issues.
  2. Find out what’s stressing your workforce (gives you an opportunity to act).
  3. Involve employees in getting the company through the recession. (How do we save? Process improvements, customer service improvements, etc.)
  4. Retain your best employees.
  5. Develop your future strategy (learn useful things to help in introducing changes, gain new ideas).
  6. Better your bottom line. (Surveying, involving, and engaging your employees are  much cheaper than replacing your best people.)

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Lessons Learned

Here are the do’s and don’ts that Benowitz has learned over years of engagement surveying:

  • Don’t conduct a survey unless you’re convinced leaders are committed to listening to and acting on feedback. (Impetus must come from the top, and you must follow through.)
  • Do partner with a third-party consulting firm—Gallup, Mercer, or Aon, for example. Surveying is a big job and very time consuming. Partnering gives you the ability to benchmark your results, allay concerns about confidentiality, and save time.
  • Do promote specific actions, successes, and progress since the last survey.
  • Do communicate your results and your “next steps,” and frequently share progress. (Consider sharing internal benchmarks.)
  • Do establish a cross-sectional committee to review overall company results and to make recommendations to management.
  • Do establish local cross-sectional subcommittees to review local results ( e.g., department, business unit, functional), and appoint local senior champions.
  • Do develop a common Action Plan Template and consider posting all plans on your intranet.
  • Do remember to focus on both “development areas” and “strengths.”
  • Do keep it simple with flawless execution.
  • Do plan for follow up feedback mechanisms (consider keeping your committee active for 12 months—your “check and balance”).
  • Don’t conduct another survey for 18 to 24 months. It takes time to analyze, share, act on findings, and show results. Also, there’s “survey fatigue” to consider.
  • Do invest less in your technology vendor and more in postsurvey results:
    • Interpretation
    • Action planning
    • Follow-up
    • Follow-through
    • Communication and branding

Many organizations fall down on that last item, says Benowitz. An Aon Hewitt 2011 Survey revealed that:

In companies who administered an employee engagement survey, 27% of managers never reviewed the results at all, and 52% reviewed the results but took no action.

This has not been the case with his clients, Benowitz says, but it points to a disturbing trend.

From engagement to incentive plan design, compensation is full of challenges. “Maintain internal equity and external competitiveness and control turnover, but still meet management’s demands for lowered costs.” Heard that one before?

Many of the professionals we serve find helpful answers to all their compensation questions at Compensation.BLR.com®, BLR’s comprehensive compensation website.

And there’s great news! The site has just been revamped in two important ways. First, compliance focus information has been updated to include the latest on COBRA, Lilly Ledbetter, and the FMLA. Second, user features are enhanced to make the site even quicker to respond to your particular needs, such as:

  • Topics Navigator—Lets you drill down by topical areas to get to the right data fast.
  • Customizable Home Page—Can be configured to display whatever content you want to see most often.
  • Menu Navigation—Displays all the main content areas and tools that you need in a simple, easy format.
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The services provided by this unique tool include:

  • Localized Salary Finder. Based on reliable research among thousands of employers, here are pay scales (including 25th, 50th, 75th, and 90th percentiles) for hundreds of commonly held jobs, from line worker to president of the company. The data are customized for your state and metro area, your industry, and your company size, so you can base your salaries on what’s offered in your specific market, not nationally.

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  • State and Federal Wage-Hour and Other Legal Advice. Plain-English explanations of wage-hour and other compensation- and benefits-related laws at both federal and state levels. “State” means the laws of your state, because the site is customized to your use. (Other states can be added at a modest extra charge.)
  • Job Descriptions. The website provides them by the hundreds, already written, legally reviewed, and compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) mandate that essential job functions be separated from those less critical. All descriptions carry employment grade levels to current norms—another huge time-saver.
  • Merit Increase, Salary, and Benefits Surveys. The service includes the results of three surveys a year. Results for exempt and nonexempt employees are reported separately.
  • Daily Updates. Comp and benefits news updated daily (as is the whole site).
  • Ask the Experts” Service. E-mail a question to our editors and get a personalized response within 3 business days.

If we sound as if we’re excited about the program, it’s because we are. For about $3 a working day, the help it offers to those with compensation responsibilities is enormous.

This one’s definitely worth a look, which you can get by clicking the link below.

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1 thought on “6 Reasons to Conduct an Employee Engagement Survey”

  1. It’s critical that you act on the results–if you just do the survey and nothing changes, it’s likely to actually alienate employees.

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