Ask the right questions

To find out what is driving employee engagement or turnover, organisations need to design meaningful surveys

In corporate world, the word employee engagement has become synonymous with events related to fun; sports or lectures or any other activity, which takes employees out of their cubicles for a get-together or group activity. One can see HR team's yearly calendar marked with these events across the year as these are a part of key performance indicators for measuring HR team's performance.

In the 70s and the 80s, employee satisfaction was important and later on employee commitment and involvement in work got added as parameters to measure employee satisfaction.

Today, employee engagement has become a motherhood statement in the corporate world based on the studies that have found that engaged employees perform better. No wonder then, companies treat employee engagement as a proxy for performance. Given the strategic impact of employee engagement on business performance as highlighted by various studies, it has become a key corporate initiative in almost all the organisations. Every year or two, each organisation does an employee engagement survey designed either in-house or carried by Gallup or Great Places to Work Institute or some other service provider. In majority of companies, organisational surveys are a regular practice. After the survey, results are analysed in every possible way and communicated. This is followed by a series of focus group discussions and interviews to find out top concerns of an organisation to improve engagement. Till this point every step is done precisely like a religious ritual in every organisation.

What happens next in terms of decisions and actions required to improve engagement makes it interesting. Instead of doing what is required, majority of organisations end up doing fun events and activities across the year or till the next survey is due. Then there is media blitzkrieg to highlight great company, visionary leaders, engaged employees, innovative practices etc to influence potential clients and talent pool. And this flurry of fun activities makes the employees reach the conclusion that this engagement survey is just another survey and nothing more. However, there are very few organisations who initiate deep interventions based on survey results to drive employee engagement.

How have organisations reached this stage of reducing key strategic initiative to mere annual survey followed by fun events? Why does an analysis of survey data result in a sort of paralysis; not leading to action in those areas of concern which have the highest impact to increase employee engagement? There are various factors, which have contributed to this paralysis:

• The purpose of employee engagement survey not being set out clearly
• Survey items being too broad resulting in inability to narrow down on few action areas
• Lack of data analysis and insight deriving skills within HR
• Low involvement of line leaders in survey design and implementation
• Using survey questionnaires or tools without aligning them to the business and cultural context of the organisation. However, to make employee engagement surveys a tool to drive engagement and change, organisations can follow following steps:

Outline purpose of the survey clearly: Making the purpose clear solves half of the challenges associated with survey administration and analysis. Organisations typically try to capture all possible challenges or issues facing an organisation through a single survey. This is possible but results in a loss of focus and inability to prioritise what to act upon and where to start. Hence it is ideal that the HR team discuses with business leaders on two or three business challenges facing the organisation with clarity on what to survey - individual issues like job satisfaction, manager feedback, group level issues like collaboration etc.

Getting the survey design right: Every engagement survey is typically designed to cover engagement factors like compensation and benefits; training and development; team work; manager effectiveness; job security etc. Design issues arise when the purpose of surveys (individual versus group level) don't align with engagement factors and if the survey design is more universal in outlook, thus making engagement surveys too broad.

To get the design right, for example, if the survey is covering engagement factors at individual and group level, then while designing survey it is better to select factors and questions for measuring each factor either at individual or group level. Data collected with this approach will help in directly focusing on engagement issues relevant to each level.

Insightful survey analysis: This is the third key element in making engagement surveys meaningful and beneficial for employees and organisations. Survey analysis and interpretation of data based on average values has limited scope in guiding organisations to take meaningful actions and is the main reason in creating the 'paralytic' situation after analysis. For example, if an organisation conducted a survey to find out causes of employee turnover (or attrition), there could be several factors like manager quality; compensation; training and development; work environment etc, which would impact employee turnover.

Now each of these factors will have sub factors which cause employee turnover. For example, manager quality can have sub factors like manager training; manager's communication ability; manager's job knowledge etc. In this case, if the organisation just uses average response rate for manager quality in analysis results, it will not give much insight as a single sub factor like manager job knowledge can be the dominant driver of employee turnover. Therefore, the point is that meaningful insights can come out only by 'causal analyses' by using advanced statistical models.

Hence, to find out real causes of what is driving employee engagement or employee turnover, organisations need to move beyond the concept of using average values and rely on sophisticated models.

Impactful action plan: Involvement of mid-level managers in grasping the survey purpose, findings and action plan is vital to making any employee engagement survey successful. This requires preparing survey results and action plans, which can be easily understood by mid-level managers and also train them in successful communications of survey results and action plans.

Kuldeep Singh
Senior Director, HR, UST Global