Challenging your employee survey to meet business demands

The emphasis on how HR uses information has become much more strategic and in this economic climate the use of information may form the distinction between the organisational winners and losers. Does your employee survey stack up?

Data should provide insight not just information

Nick Kemsley in Personnel Today discusses how it has become more important for HR to use data to provide insight rather than just information, how it needs to relate to business impact rather than process and how HR must become more comfortable using less precise macro-level or trend data. The competitive advantage to those organisations embracing this shift in mindset should surely leave them better placed to weather the changing economy.

Feedback from employees, and in particular outputs from feedback tools such as employee surveys, needs to be incorporated into the business strategy and the information used to inform and drive it.

Does your employee survey deliver?

In light of this you need to ask yourself if your employee survey is delivering for your organisation. When considering your survey activities look at how your survey measures up in three main areas: survey design, output and action planning.

Critically, under review does your current survey output match anecdotal feedback or data from other sources (staff turnover or absence levels) – if not what is the survey failing to pick up and how can the questionnaire be designed to capture this information in the future?

Does the survey analysis and output deliver on the initial survey requirement? If your survey is designed to address employee engagement, does the reporting identify items that drive levels of high engagement for your organisation? Looking at their survey results Barclays were able to identify that wellbeing underpins employee engagement in their organisation.

Does the feedback differ across the organisation? It is often the case that different business areas or even teams will have different issues and areas of good performance. You need to ensure that you tailor your action plans to specific units and locations to allow these local issues to be addressed. Often there may be areas of best practice within the organisation that others can learn from are you able to identify these from your survey feedback?

By tackling a review of each area of your employee survey separately through from design, output and action planning you can challenge your staff survey to meet your organisations needs.

If you’d like a fresh pair of eyes for your employee survey, why not contact us?