Dennis Lodge

Before we get started, we should cover why employee engagement survey analysis is key for your business. Did you know that a staggering majority of employees are not engaged in their work?

In fact, according to one study, only 20 percent of employees worldwide are actually engaged in their work.

That means that the vast majority of people are just going through the motions day after day, without any real passion or enthusiasm for what they do. Why is this such a huge problem? Well, employee engagement is critical for any organization.

After all, it’s the employees who do the actual work and make things happen. If they’re not engaged and motivated, then the organization is going to suffer.

How can you get your employees more engaged?

One way is to conduct an employee engagement survey. But once you’ve collected all that data, what do you do with it?

This guide will teach you everything you need to know about analyzing employee engagement survey data so that you can take action and improve your workforce’s engagement levels. 

What is employee engagement?

Employee engagement has become a popular topic of discussion among businesses in recent years. But what is employee engagement, and why is it so important?

Employee engagement can be defined as a measure of how motivated, involved, and committed employees are to their work and their employer. Achieving high levels of employee engagement is essential for businesses to succeed for several reasons. Here are the most notable reasons:

Engaged employees are more productive

Studies have shown that engaged employees take less time off, and generally speaking, engaged workers are also more likely to stay with their company, which saves on the costs of recruiting and training new employees.

While it’s impossible to put a price tag on employee engagement, it’s clear that it offers businesses a wide range of benefits. With that in mind, it’s no surprise that so many companies are looking for ways to increase engagement levels among their workforce.

Engaged employees are more productive

A study by Gallup found that companies with engaged employees saw a 21% increase in profitability. In today’s competitive business landscape, companies that can create a culture of employee engagement will be the ones that thrive.

The study found that engaged employees are more likely to stay with their company, and they’re also more likely to go above and beyond for customers. As a result, organizations with engaged employees enjoy higher levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty.

In addition, engaged employees are more productive and have lower levels of absenteeism. Just like opting for resume help to increase your odds of landing a job, all of these factors add up to a significant competitive advantage for companies that can create a culture of employee engagement.

How to design an employee engagement survey

Optimizing your employee engagement survey analysis, you need to think carefully about its design.

There are a few key things you can do to ensure that your survey is successful. You’ll want to find a top-of-the-line survey maker to make sure you have all the tools and features you need to create an employee engagement survey.

The most important thing is to make sure that your survey covers all of the key areas that you want to measure. Here are the steps for designing an effective employee engagement survey:

Choose your topic

The first step in designing an employee engagement survey is to choose your topic. What do you want to learn from your employees? Do you want to find out about their satisfaction with their job, their level of engagement, or something else entirely?

The topic you choose will determine the type of questions you ask and the overall tone of the survey. Once you’ve decided on an issue, you can move on to the next step.

You’ll want to ask a mix of close-ended questions, which you can use to draw conclusions based on statistical analysis. Intersperse these with some open-ended questions that ask employees to expand on why they gave specific answers. This qualitative data will allow you to dig deeper into the why of it all.

Keep timing in mind

When designing an employee engagement survey, you’ll want to wait for the right time to ask employees to participate. You don’t want to administer the survey during a busy or stressful time for your employees. Not only will they struggle to prioritize the feedback, but that feedback may even be influenced because they’re under pressure.

For example, if you know that quarterly reviews are coming up, you might want to wait to administer the survey until after they’re over. In general, it’s best to conduct the employee survey when things are relatively calm at your company. That way, you’ll get more accurate results.

Set a duration and frequency

The next step is to set the duration and frequency of your survey. How long do you want the survey to be? And how often do you want to administer it?

Remember, you don’t want to overburden your employees with a long or frequent survey. A good rule of thumb is to keep the survey short (no more than 10 minutes) and administer it no more than once per quarter.

Write survey questions that provide actionable data

Once you’ve decided on your survey’s topic, timing, and frequency, it’s time to start thinking about the interactive questions you’ll ask. This is arguably the most important part of designing an effective employee engagement survey.

Your goal should be to identify questions that will provide results you can act on. In other words, you want to ask questions that will help you improve your employees’ experience at your company.

Here are a few examples of questions you might want to ask:

1. How engaged are you with your work?
2. Do you feel like your job is fulfilling?
3. Do you feel like your skills are being utilized?
4. Do you feel like you have the opportunity to grow and develop at your job?
5. Do you feel like your managers’ support and value your work?

These are just a few examples of questions you might want to ask. The important thing is to choose questions that will give you the information you need to make improvements.

3 Steps for employee engagement survey analysis

Once you’ve administered your employee engagement survey, it’s time to perform some data analysis. This can seem daunting, but it’s relatively simple if you follow these steps.

Step 1: Calculate the overall score

The first step is to calculate the overall score for each question. This will give you a general idea of how your employees feel about each issue.

To calculate the overall score, simply add up the number of employees who responded positively to each question and divide by the total number of respondents.

For example, let’s say you asked the question, “Do you feel like your job is fulfilling?” and 50% of your employees said yes. This means the overall score for this question would be 50%.

Step 2: Identify themes

The next step is to look for themes in the results. This will help you identify the areas that are most important to your employees. This is possibly the most important steps of employee engagement survey analysis.

To do this, simply read through the responses and look for patterns. What are employees saying about the company? Are there common complaints? What are employees most happy with?

Identifying themes will help you focus on the areas that are most important to your employees.

Step 3: Take action

Once you’ve analyzed your survey results, it’s time to take action. This is where you’ll use the information you’ve gathered to make improvements in your company.

First, you’ll want to develop a plan of action. This should include specific steps you’ll take to improve the areas that are most important to your employees.

Then, you’ll want to implement your plan and track the results. This will help you see if your efforts are making a difference.

What to do with employee engagement survey results

The results of these surveys can be both positive and negative. However, it is important to remember that even the most personalized custom survey is only a tool to help identify problems and potential solutions.

It is not a silver bullet that will solve all of your company’s problems. So what should you do with the results of an employee engagement survey?

First, you should take the time to review the results carefully. Look for patterns and trends that may be indicative of underlying issues. Identify areas for improvement and put together an action plan for all those who would be involved in the changes.

This plan should involve key stakeholders from across the company, including team managers, employees, and HR professionals. With Shout, there are lots of ways for you to share results, from spreadsheet and PDF exports to sharing your digital report with a URL link.

Finally, you should track your progress over time to ensure that your efforts are having a positive impact on employee engagement.

One of the best early ways to improve engagement is to make sure employees know that you’re now aware of their feedback (both negative and positive) and outline some of the ways you’re going to address it.

Wrapping up

Employee engagement is a critical issue for any company, so it’s super important to take employee engagement survey analysis seriously.

By taking the time to design and administer an employee engagement survey, you can gather the information you need to make improvements in your business. Use these tips to ensure that your survey is successful.

The post Guide to Employee Engagement Survey Analysis appeared first on Shout.com.

• What is a 360 review?
• What should be measured in a 360 review?
• Analyzing and reporting 360 feedback
• Advantages of 360 reviews
• Disadvantages of 360 reviews
• Tips for performing 360 reviews

What is a 360 review?

A 360 review is the process of evaluating employee performance by collecting feedback from their peers, managers and subordinates. It’s an effective development tool for staff members at all levels.

It differs from traditional performance appraisals, which typically only provide feedback from a manager. 360-degree feedback focuses on how an employee’s contribution affects the work of fellow employees at all levels.

Most commonly, human resources departments use 360 reviews to understand how employees perform across all elements of their role.

The feedback should be constructive and unbiased to identify how they’re already succeeding and what needs improvement.

The goal is not to criticise an individual on what they do wrong. It is to help them understand their strengths and weaknesses from the perspectives of those they interact with routinely.

Who provides the 360 reviews?

360 feedback should be given by several sources, which can be internal and external to your organization. These can include:

• Immediate managers
• Peers and co-workers
• Subordinates
• Stakeholders
• Customers
• Self-assessment

Managers should always perform a review to assess the quality of the employee’s work. This would be in regards to KPIs and contribution to organizational goals.

Peers and team members should then provide another 5 – 10 reviews. These should be people who work with the employee regularly but can be internal or external.

It’s essential that the reviwee should also perform a self-assessment. This allows for a comparison between perspectives in your results analysis.

To encourage open and honest feedback, it should be made clear to all involved that feedback will be anonymous.

What should be measured in a 360 review?

360 feedback should measure competencies that encompass the entirety of an employee’s role. E.g. Creative skills, customer interaction, communication and leadership.

You could use close-ended questions to create a multi-rater review system for these competencies. Where the tallied ratings would highlight strengths and weaknesses. However, this would leave your results fairly one dimensional and without context.

Alternatively, you could employ open-ended questions to collect more in-depth feedback on an employee’s performance. But these require significantly more time and effort to analyze.

We’d recommend you use both these question types in tandem. This way, you’re not only quantifying performance feedback but also providing context to ratings.

It’s also important that any events or incidents are accurately reported (which open questions provide the space for). This is to gauge impact in the workplace and determine whether their behaviour is consistent with organizational goals.

However, make clear to all those giving reviews that these events/ incidents should be based in fact. And not on opinion or ‘feeling’.

Analyzing and reporting 360 feedback

All responses, including the self-reflection, should be collated as an average for the performance evaluation.

One person’s perspective is not indicative of an employee’s attitude or behaviour. But an aggregated report provides a more objective viewpoint.

Ensure that the feedback is constructive and descriptive, so the reviewee has a clear course of action.

You should also compare the results of the self-reflection against the larger group to identify the recipient’s ‘blind-spots’.

Blind-spots are areas where the recipient’s self-evaluation differs to that of the reviewers.

The 360 process often leads to higher employee engagement and satisfaction. It will also improve customer relationships and reduce staff turnover in the long term.

Forbes has a detailed list of ways to encourage employee engagement.

Advantages of 360 reviews

• Wide variety of sources with different perspectives
• Sense of accountability is promoted in the workplace
• Identifies procedures and structures that stunt employee growth
• Uncovers employee development opportunities
• The anonymity of feedback allows for honest feedback
• Provides insight on training needs
• Core organizational competencies are promoted in all those giving and receiving feedback
• The opportunity to provide feedback prevents the build-up of tension between employees in the workplace

Disadvantages of 360 reviews

• A failure to plan and implement the feedback process effectively may impact the quality of data
• Feedback providers tend to focus on criticism, meaning your results may be negatively weighted
• There’s a chance that employees will collaborate and provide eachother with artificially positive feedback
• Substantial data is needed to make the results meaningful and actionable
• Employees will need to pause current tasks to provide the feedback
• Data analysis can also be time-consuming
• People may not answer honestly because they think the reviewee or a manager will read their feedback
• Feedback loses value if only given by a few team members. The more people giving feedback, the more objective and actionable your results will be
• Asking for feedback too often can demoralize employees

Tips for performing 360 reviews

Here are our top tips for conducting 360-degree feedback effectively and efficiently.

1. Train staff in the 360 processes

Employees will need guidance for providing 360 reviews. You must brief them on how to give impartial feedback. And to focus on more than the negative aspects of their colleagues’ performance.

2. Ensure feedback is anonymous

Those providing feedback should remain anonymous for a few reasons. Firstly, it will encourage open and honest feedback and, secondly, it will prevent any workplace hostility that may arise.

3. Only give contructive feedback

The purpose of 360-degree feedback is to highlight areas of development and encourage reviewees to take action. Once your results analysis is complete, you should give the reviewee specific suggestions for how to improve their performance.

4. Keep the survey short

We’d recommend you keep your 360 feedback survey as short as possible. The longer it is, the more likely it is to cause survey fatigue. This will result in one of two things: a low completion rate or responses of poor quality.

5. Act on the results

For this process to be effective, all parties need to be willing to incorporate the feedback. This not only applies to the reviewee but also the organization they belong to. 

This is because there can be pre-existing structures or processes hindering an employee’s performance.

6. Conduct 360 reviews regularly

These evaluations should be a regular process, to set goals and benchmark progress over time. This will ensure all employees remain motivated in their development.

But don’t conduct performance reviews too often or as a deterrent or punishment for staff. This will lead to a negative work culture, where employees feel under constant pressure or surveillance.

The post 360 Reviews: Improving Performance with Feedback appeared first on Shout.com.