Tuesday, September 3, 2019

Not Another Employee Engagement Survey - Please



Are you really thinking of doing another employee engagement survey?  Do you really want to take on this huge annual project spend many months analyzing the data to  spend another couple months planning what to do with it in order to take action a year or more after on whatever was driving those scores in the first place?

Maybe more frequent data collection to uncover short term issues with a program designed to address performance improvement issues on the spot would be a better use of your time and money?  These frequent short term surveys, referred to as pulse surveys, offer the ability to quickly and frequently measure feedback within entire groups.  You can judge real time engagement and react accordingly. Think of these as a way of gathering data that is current, rather than on an annual basis.  Reacting in a timely manner can often make all the difference.

Traditionally, employee engagement data has been reported in the aggregate when it is really a metric about individuals.  Why not design the survey to specific needs and challenges and not ask everyone the same question? This would lead to more targeted action, better supervision of performance improvement issues, and the ability to use proven techniques of employee recognition to drive results. The one area of concern in an individual approach is that the data would no longer be anonymous, but frankly, there’s not much about attitude and performance that is anonymous in any case.  If you want to improve discretionary effort you can look for the signals of them in the data that point directly to it.

The safety industry for years has been using the psychological based principles of behavior to improve safety performance.  This approach observes performance that can lead to accidents and rewards individuals who perform those safe behaviors in the described manner.   This just in time approach to changing performance can be done to improve performance on any number of the issues that help to build employee engagement throughout the organization, not just safety.
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Instead of another employee engagement survey, and considering the new technologies and analytical tools we have, isn’t it time to experiment with new approaches to determine what kinds of data might help with that?

For more information on Ultimate Choice Inc.’s products or services or other white papers please contact us at Ultimatechoiceinfo@cox.net


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