Retire Your Annual Employee Engagement Survey: Why And How
The annual employee engagement survey stands to face a vote of no confidence. Unloved by everyone who completes it, and unable to improve stubbornly low rates of engagement, it sticks out like a sore thumb when we use real-time data as the basis of our decisions in finance, marketing, product development and more.
That’s not to say companies aren’t taking engagement seriously. Considering Right Management studies show engaged workforces return 33% higher profits, and enjoy 44% higher staff retention, it’s no wonder leaders consistently place the topic as their top priority in Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends – while The Economist reports that 87% of C-level executives recognise disengagement to be one of the biggest threats to their organisations.
With all this will, why is there no way? A common set of charges against the annual survey is now widely agreed upon:
- The speed that modern organisations need to innovate, change and grow, allied with shorter employee tenures, means that surveying once a year simply doesn’t give you enough data points to understand your business. You’re left trying to solve last year’s problems with last year’s data.
- They’re forced to ask too many questions to cover a broad range of topics, but can still fail to capture enough detail to make an action plan easily decipherable. Employees often grow tired of answering after ten-or-more questions, resulting in lower quality feedback.
- The time it takes to run these surveys, combined with the difficulty of generating actionable insights from their responses, often sends these initiatives on a downward spiral: When management can’t confidently make changes based on the surveys, employees grow cynical about their usefulness, the quality of feedback gets worse, making it harder still to act on.
A problem that’s been solved before: Learning from the customer satisfaction revolution
How then, can this realisation help us find an alternative to the annual employee survey? The data-driven transformation of how businesses work with customer satisfaction can provide an answer. Not so long ago, customer support was commonly seen as cost to be kept to an absolute minimum (no doubt it still is in some businesses) and the thoughts of customers and product users would be periodically gathered by sending out long surveys. Three trends then completely turned the process on its head:- In the digital economy many businesses realised that retaining existing customers and making them happy, is far more profitable than constantly chasing new business. (To anyone who’s dealing with the cost of losing key employees and struggling to find their replacements, does this sound familiar?)
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) became established as a simple, common metric for measuring customer satisfaction, with well documented links to improved customer retention.
- The rise of tools like Zendesk and SalesForce gave teams the analytics capabilities to better understand their customers and their business.