By Anne Maltese
Your employee engagement survey is over. But it’s not time to celebrate yet. The work has just begun. When it comes to engagement strategies, organizations often throw in the towel at the wrong moment.
Employees will overwhelmingly tell you their organizations could do better at responding to their feedback. 2 in 3 employees believe that their organizations fail to do anything with their survey feedback. This is discouraging, because the only way to connect employees to their work, teams, and organization and engage them is to act.
A survey doesn’t create engaged employees. Only doing something meaningful with that feedback does.
Action planning is the most important thing organizations can do for engagement. We turn to many excuses for not acting — lack of time or resources, unwillingness to change, organizational culture, or no leader to step up to lead the charge. And then when survey time comes around again, we try to find workarounds for being short on time, remedy survey fatigue, and even propose cutting out the action part.
Three Action Planning “Solutions” That are Deceiving You
I have long suspected that the trending issues we see with employee listening year after year are due to misguided efforts to solve the real problem: action planning. Organizations often focus on survey response rates but Gartner research emphasizes communicating the actions that came from survey feedback. But if you’re not acting, there’s not much to communicate, right?
There are good intentions behind these action planning solutions, but they don’t solve for taking effective action on survey results.
1. Frequent Mini-Pulses
The idea here is that shorter, more frequent surveys are easier to manage and act on. But does increasing the frequency of action planning actually make the process easier? No. It still doesn't solve the action planning problem. It might even lead to survey fatigue, or what I have dubbed, a lack of action fatigue. McKinsey research also describes survey fatigue as a myth.
2. Biennial Engagement Surveys
A lack of progress on post-survey action doesn’t mean you should survey less. Some organizations launch engagement surveys every other year, especially more “traditional” organizations. This is starting to be rarer, thankfully. But it still occurs. And it’s still not solving the actual problem. Less frequent surveys don’t give you more time to act. It often delays responding to high-priority issues and makes it more difficult for you to connect actions back to the engagement survey. By the time you do act on these insights, your actions may very well be irrelevant. A one year cadence helps you keep up with constant organizational and perception changes.
3. Only Using Passive Measurement
A lack of a survey means you don’t have a survey to respond to. But once again, this isn’t showing employees that you’re listening to them and value their perspectives. Some organizations have turned to passive listening only. This type of listening analyzes things like tone and emotions in employee communication that already exist outside of surveys. Passive engagement measurement is a great approach, in addition to surveys. They should supplement the survey though, not replace it entirely.
Changing the length and frequency of the survey, or eliminating it all together, are solutions aimed at the wrong problem. Action planning doesn’t have to be complex.
Think AFTER: 5 Steps for Simplifying Action Planning
The best engagement action plans are about operations: how can the team operate more effectively? It’s not pizza parties or happy hours. It’s communicating more effectively. Being intentional about recognition. Prioritizing learning. Action planning isn’t a check-the-box exercise. It’s building muscles on how to better operate over time.
Action planning doesn’t need to be time-consuming, complicated, or overwhelming. When you’re ready to take action, think AFTER. Use this framework when you think about action planning. It’ll help you simplify, streamline, and speed up the process so you can move quickly from asking employees for their feedback to taking action.
Step 1 – Analyze
You need to make sense of your survey results and help leaders and managers understand their team results. Begin by identifying areas with high and low engagement.
Understanding these patterns will help you find areas that need action. Then look beyond the numbers. You must dig deep for underlying themes and context to what the numbers say.
Share this data and team data with managers. We often overlook the role managers play in action planning. Sharing data early empowers them to make impactful team changes. You can make it easier for managers to assist with action planning by supplying them with team reports, helping them understand their results, and making a couple of recommendations for areas they should focus on.
Step 2 – Focus
It’s rare that we drive to a place we’ve never been without GPS. Why would action planning be any different? Just like you plan a road trip with points of interest and breaks along the way, you want to outline a handful of key areas you’re going to prioritize for action. Identify areas that are going to make the most impact on engagement. Do that on the organizational level and encourage managers to do it on the team level.
Step 3 – Team Discussion
Employees need to be involved in the action planning process. This helps them feel valued for their opinions and lets them know that you’re taking their feedback seriously. Start by discussing the organization results with employees and empower managers to have discussions on team results. Utilize the team discussions for brainstorming. Let employees contribute their ideas and solutions for an effective team effort.
Help managers ask targeted questions to understand what matters most to their teams. These discussions should be creative and foster open dialogue so managers can use these ideas to take effective action. Employees feel a sense of ownership when you make them part of the plan to improve.
Step 4 - Execute
The organization and managers have the beginnings of a plan they can work with. It’s time to create goals and objectives that are defined and measurable. Make sure the actions you plan to take are aligned with the areas you need to focus on.
Ensure everyone understands the role they play in plan execution. Leaders and managers are accountable for their parts. Then communicate the plan to the organization and have managers do the same with their teams. Now it’s time to go!
Step 5 – Remind
You’ve launched your plan. But that’s not the end. You still need to continue to communicate actions, track progress, and adjust as necessary. Give the organization and teams regular status updates. Follow up with managers to see where they’re experiencing challenges and if they might need extra support. Nudge where necessary to keep the momentum going.
Action is the most important part of employee surveys. You can’t skip it. But action planning doesn’t have to be a pain. With a well thought out plan, you can unite the organization to work together for continuous improvement.
Anne Maltese is the Director of People Insights at Quantum Workplace. She is passionate about making work better every day by coaching organizations on how to design engaging employee experiences that drive business success. Prior to joining Quantum Workplace, Anne was a consultant at Gallup, working with organizations to solve their most pressing business problems. Anne has a master’s degree in I/O Psychology from the University of Akron and over a decade of experience specializing in employee engagement, performance management, and workplace cultures.
