Surveys can help you gauge how invested your employees are in your business. Obviously, simply conducting an employee engagement survey isn't enough. You have to analyze the results to determine what to do. As you're analyzing the results, you may notice variations in several key areas:
Generation: Engagement scores and needs often vary significantly across generations, and addressing these variances requires careful action planning.
Tenure: Employees typically join an organization filled with hope and enthusiasm, but their engagement level usually drops after the first year. Worse, they generally remain lower than year-one levels, with a corollary increase in turnover, until the employee reaches years four to eight (depending on the company).
As you analyze your engagement results and consider where you want to concentrate your efforts, you'll likely want to focus at least some of your efforts on employees in this “valley of despair.”
Business unit, department, and/or location: The better leaders in your company most likely have more engaged employees and, thus, superior survey results, while the not-so-good leaders will usually see poorer results.
The good news? You now have quantitative evidence to take back to the poorer managers, and they can no longer hide behind the argument that so-called “soft” skills aren't measurable.
As you analyze the results, think about the importance of corporate social responsibility (CSR) as an engagement driver. Employees want to work for a company that has a purpose and is committed to sustainability.
Indeed, recent research by Dale Carnegie shows that this is one of two key factors to improving employees’ pride in their organization and raising their level of engagement (the other being whether the company's values reflected their own). Look for ways to leverage this engagement driver as you build your action plan.
Your engagement initiative is not about making your employees happy (although happiness is often a byproduct of engagement). It's about engaging your employees in your business in order to drive business success!