6 Reasons to Conduct an Engagement—Not a Satisfaction—Survey

Yesterday’s Advisor featured consultant Allan Benowitz on why you shouldn’t measure satisfaction. Today, the do’s and don’ts of engagement surveys, plus an introduction to a unique guide just for HR managers in smaller, or even one-person, HR departments.

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

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

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 Hewitt, 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.

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• 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.

Employee engagement—just one more challenge for HR managers. From hiring to firing, HR’s never easy, and in a small department, it’s just that much tougher.

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