Actions to Take After Your Employee Engagement Survey
Good for you. You surveyed your workforce to check on their level of employee engagement. But you need to realize that asking engagement survey questions is only the first step toward improving levels of employee advocacy, discretionary effort, and retention. Now, just like after any assessment of organizational culture, you need to follow through and take action based upon the survey results.
What Happens if You Do Not Follow Through on Your Survey Results?
If you ask questions without following up, you might actually worsen the situation. When you ask employees for feedback, you raise employees’ expectations that their opinions matter and that their work environment will improve. Ignoring the results will undermine their trust in company leadership and reduce their level of commitment to the business.
In fact, when leaders follow through on action plans that are co-created in team work groups, employee engagement increases 12 times greater compared to those companies that do not.
5 Actions to Take After Your Employee Engagement Survey
So follow-up action from leaders and managers is needed.
Let your workforce know that you as leaders are committed to making changes and how they fit into overall strategic and talent priorities. Then set up a timeline and communication system that keeps employees informed of progress and be clear about how stakeholders will be actively involved going forward.
Then prioritize the list and select the critical few priorities that you can work on in the next 90-days that have the greatest chance for improvement in your unique situation. Make sure that you focus on what is in your control and on areas that are directly tied to your company’s strategic priorities.
Do not waste your time on areas that do not make sense for your company’s strategic focus or unique organizational culture.
Refine the list and then set up “owners” for each task, establish a timeline for delivery, and pick dates for key follow-up meetings.
The Bottom Line
Employee engagement action planning is crucial. When leaders take engagement survey results seriously and involve workers in solving the problems that come to light, employees trust the system and believe that their leaders care. Go ahead and ask the questions as long as you are committed to taking meaningful steps toward improvement with your employees based upon what you learn.
To learn more about actions to take after your employee engagement survey, download Employee Engagement Mistakes: Are You Aimlessly Engaging Your Employees?
Explore real world results for clients like you striving to create higher performance