It’s powerful to know what your employees think! You can identify problems like poor supervision, communication breakdown, and mounting plans to leave your company before expensive turnover affects your business. While investing effort and money into that employee engagement survey process was important, the real work begins after the results are in. Because a survey is a tool for initiating meaningful dialogue among the members of an organization, it’s critical to communicate well with employees about why the survey is important and what will happen as a result of the exercise.
When an organization conducts an employee survey, it is entering into a social contract with employees: feedback is exchanged for management’s consideration and action. Employees provide information with the expectation that leadership will listen to input and use that information to improve the organization. If employees don’t hear about employee survey results, they may feel their perspectives are not valued. Furthermore, without clear communication, rumors about results might crop up. Employees tell us that surveys without resulting communication about action can be disheartening.
This article examines how to communicate employee survey results, so that employees feel heard and your organization is positioned to improve.
Do the Analysis
Any useful employee survey will not only identify your strengths and weaknesses, but also what’s driving employee engagement at your organization. Your reports should shed light on which departments, locations, or job roles need your attention so you can decide where you’ll take action.
When you understand your employee survey results, you’ll be well-positioned to not only report the findings, but also to know how your employees want to be communicated with.
Say Thanks
It was a little scary for your employees to give you their feedback. No one wants to walk into the boss’s office to say, “I don’t like my work, you don’t pay me enough, and I don’t plan on staying long.” But that’s exactly what you asked them to do. And they did. Tell them how much you appreciate their help. Let them know why it matters.
Celebrate and Validate Your Employees
This is a time to celebrate! Share some of the attributes with the most positive feedback. This is an opportunity to amplify what you do well. Reinforce corporate values, amplify employee voice, and have a good time doing it! Get creative when you communicate strengths. A poster campaign, call-outs at company meetings, balloons and flowers, snacks in the break room and awards to recognize the champions of those strengths are all ways to celebrate. If great supervisor relationships are a strength, appreciate these unsung heroes. If fun in the office is a strength, do more of that!
For the areas that analysis has revealed as opportunities for improvement, validate your employees when you emphasize that you heard them. You understand that there’s a need for more ongoing training or more clarity around career paths. Share early plans for next steps to make those improvements.
Strengthen Weak Areas
Your analysis will have reveled opportunities for improvement. Keeping in mind your key drivers of engagement, choose up to three attributes to improve. It may be tempting to do more, but resist the urge! When you make a dedicated effort to change only three things, you increase your ability to make an impact. Plus, you can communicate clearly with the team about what’s being done in response to their feedback.
Action itself is critical to change, but be sure to also communicate to the staff what’s being done. Here’s a three-step recipe for a successful communication about strengthening weaknesses:
- Validate your employees. Tell them that you appreciate their feedback, that they’ve been heard, and that apparently, these identified things need attention.
- Share the plan to make change happen. Be sure that leadership is involved. While it’s tempting to empower employees to make the needed changes, it’s unfair to put the onus for change on employees. Staffers need to see leadership cut red tape and lead the charge for improvement.
- Update the team regularly, to avoid the sentiment, “hey, whatever happened with those survey results?”
Final Thoughts
Ultimately, each organization has developed a unique information-sharing culture. While in some cases, particularly if the survey indicated communication is a problem, the process will need some adjustment, we understand that each organization will have an approach to information sharing that it typically leverages.
Adjustments to our recommended approach may be necessary to account for an organization’s unique information-sharing culture.
Best Employee Surveys| Employee Retention
It’s powerful to know what your employees think. You can identify problems like poor supervision, communication breakdown, and mounting plans to leave your company before expensive turnover affects your business. Getting your hands on your Employee Feedback Reports has never been so easy and affordable.
Best Employee Surveys provides survey tools and comprehensive reporting. We offer customizable options to ensure that your organization is capturing data in the most effective way. Because we survey half a million employees, representing their 5,000 employers, each year, we have extensive data that supports trending analyses and ongoing research by a number of authors, researchers and presenters. Put it to work for your company.
