Employee Opinion / Satisfaction & Engagement Surveys

According to Gallup research, the following are the engagement statistics of employees across corporate America:

17% are actively disengaged,
29% are actively engaged in the workplace, and
54% are somewhere in the middle – neither disengaged nor engaged.

From a Human Resource strategy perspective, companies need to:

• Terminate the actively disengaged as they are “terrorists in the ranks.”
• Find ways to actively engage the 54% who need to do more than just show-up.
• Continue implementing systems to build on the behaviors of the actively engaged.

But where should a company begin in order to implement this strategy?

Our recommendation is to begin with a well-designed survey that reveals hard data as to the intensity of the issues that are important to a productive and profitable business.

As such, we offer organizations two employee relations surveys:

• Opinion/Satisfaction
• Engagement

An opinion/satisfaction survey is one of the quickest ways to “take the temperature” of a group of employees and discover issues of concern and areas for immediate improvement such as compensation, benefits, policies, training, working conditions, etc.

An engagement survey is designed to improve productivity and employee loyalty by measuring the passion of a workforce in the areas of supervisory management, corporate leadership, the work environment, organizational culture, and the individual roles of employees.

We offer a 5-step approach to implementing our surveys:

1. Survey Design
2. Survey Administration
3. Confidential Data Collection
4. Data Processing & Analysis
5. Action Plan

But why use a consultant, when a company can do its own questionnaire in-house?

We offer the following responses to this question:

• Our experience in this area is helpful in designing questions to eliminate any managerial bias and leading questions.
• We have found that the return rate of responses is on average 20% higher, as we are viewed by employees as an independent third party that will respect the confidentiality of their responses and ensure that there are no reprisals for honest opinions.
• We have the advantage of having a wide range of experiences in analyzing and interpreting survey results, which can help avoid the misinterpretation of results by inexperienced managers.
• Our background in developing plans of action and holding people accountable for results becomes extremely important, as employees will look to see what organizational changes take place following a survey.

We have found that a well-designed and administered survey offers three primary advantages over other methods of obtaining employee feedback in that:

• A survey ensures that all employees in a group have an opportunity to participate.
• A survey ensures that everyone will be heard, not just the people who are the most outspoken.
• The anonymity of the survey allows employees to be more candid in their responses, especially in their responses to write-in questions.