As COVID-19 spreads exponentially across the globe employees are yearning for information. They are living with uncertainty. Employers need to be agile and responsive. Communication just became significantly more important for prioritizing and stabilizing the employee experience. However, one of the key pillars missing from this communication and employee experience strategy is “listening to its own employees.”

Gathering employee feedback is the first step towards making more informed decisions that affect your people. Employees can more easily contribute to shaping workplace culture when there is an outlet for their thoughts and opinions, like an employee pulse survey.

An earlier study in 2017 claimed that disengaged employees cost their organizations $450-$550 BN. So how do you make sure your efforts don’t go in vain and you implement an employee engagement strategy that works? 

Many organizations employ annual or semi-annual employee engagement surveys to get a better understanding of company pain points, concerns, and overall needs for their employees. While these engagement surveys give you a great initial gauge of how all your employees feel, companies need a way to act on engagement data in real time so employees feel like they’re being heard. Employee pulse surveys – like Xoxoday Pulse -  is a quick and powerful way to truly understand the voice of the employee.  

Here is how pulse surveys bridge those gaps in annual / bi-annual surveys, and helps you measure what really matters.

Translating data into action

Once there’s a regular survey measurement process in place, it doesn’t mean our work is done. Remember, engagement isn’t a check-the-box activity. After we collect the data, it’s time to use it to inform action. This is the most critical step in engagement management and really the sole reason for instituting real-time measurement.

So, how can companies ensure their measurement is really working?

Ask for specific feedback

In employee surveys, ask for feedback around specific issues, and track to see if the experience around those issues has changed. A generic survey with a feedback question will not lead you to uncover the real challenges of employees. For e.g,  For example, has work-life balance in a certain region become an issue?

Improve engagement, productivity and performance with Xoxoday Pulse. Click here to know more  >>

Identify areas for action

Once you’ve run your survey and found what areas need improvement, and start prioritizing. Address the areas which have scored very less as compared to the ones which are scored a little lesser. This not only increases the time to fill gaps in your engagement strategy but also led to half-baked results.

Making sense of data: Data visualization

Then, to ensure the data drives change, engage in simple, short-term action. One of the biggest impediments of improving engagement is the implementation of complex plans that are cumbersome to move forward. 

Translating data into achievable actions can speed up your engagement strategy and help accelerate bridging the gap between experience of employees.

Anonymous

Most employees don't trust surveys with the fear of revealing their identity and responses about how they feel. To get accurate survey results, it’s vital that employees feel comfortable while taking the survey.

Employees will only be open and transparent about their challenges if the survey is anonymous and does not reveal their identity. The technologies available today offer employee surveys with this much-needed anonymity. Consequently, the survey results gathered will reflect a more genuine representation of the engagement level in the workplace.

Real-Time Trend Analysis

A good employee survey will help you to measure employee engagement by analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of your workplace. It gives you the ability to view real-time insights by analyzing engagement trends over time.

The survey results reflect the improvements in scores, so you get to know if a new action plan that you have implemented is working or failing. Such analysis helps in measuring not only employee engagement levels but also other criteria such as employee turnover.

With the changing paradigm of work and the ways of working, employee engagement is constantly changing. What matters a year before might not be relevant for the current world of work and talent. Even the companies that already have engagement measurement in place need to carefully consider whether there’s room for improvement. Measuring what truly matters provides real-time insight will allow leaders to better understand their workforce and take action to deliver a more engaging workplace experience.

To know more about how to get most out of your employee surveys, visit Xoxoday here.