Who cares about what your people think and feel?
The simple answer is - you should!
Knowing how your people are feeling about work, whether they’re engaged, fulfilled, encouraged is of infinite importance to our collective success. In fact, studies show us that companies with highly engaged employees are linked with improved profit, customer satisfaction, lower staff turnover and less absenteeism. I think we can all agree we’re up for that!
So, where do you start gaining meaningful insights? Firstly, think about what you’re trying to achieve, ask the questions that lead to insights that you can do something with. Unless you plan to improve your culture or improve the employee experience, there’s really no point. Weighing the pig, doesn’t make it fatter.
Share the results with your people and tell them the action you’ll be taking in response. If your people can see that you’ve really listened and are making improvements this alone will improve engagement.
My Top Tips would be:
- Do regular and timely surveys – once a month should be enough
- Keep questions short and sweet
- Anonymity – if you have a culture where people will tell the truth, great. If you don’t, make it anonymous and give your people a space to be honest
- Benchmarking – do it against your own history but also other companies of a similar size and a in a similar industry
- Be transparent
- Act on the insights – get your people involved. Change shouldn’t be done to people but alongside them
- Keep it going
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