Engagement Surveys as Your Manager and Executive Report Card
Summer is typically Employee Engagement Survey season.
Many of the “Best places to work” applications require your engagement scores in order to qualify. During the summer, you’re likely planning to launch your engagement survey to your teams for this very reason.
But are you considering how you’ll respond to your engagement survey?
Are you mentally and emotionally prepared to review the results?
If you’re in the Talent world, you’re probably dedicating the majority of your day to the employee or candidate experience. Your efforts to create equity, diversity, and inclusion in your company are tireless.
And so sometimes the results of the survey can be really frustrating. And disheartening. All your hard work and your scores may have only minimal improvements at best. Especially after over a year of pandemic, crisis, and isolation.
But you can’t fix what you don’t know about.
Most companies that I work with only survey their employees for scores like these once a year.
In that way, it can feel like an employee’s experience of Annual Review season. They may be hoping for all the praise, kudos, and hoping for a promotion or raise. Only to walk into their Review conversations to be confronted with constructive criticism that they’ve never heard even a whisper of all year.
Before I get ahead of myself… More on Annual Reviews in another post. Make sure you subscribe to not miss that update.
Engagement Surveys are also frequently called Culture Surveys. They’re not just a measurement of how engaged your employees are, but a measurement on how supportive your culture is to their growth, productivity, and motivation.
These surveys are a goldmine of data that can influence your strategies on:
Executive Development
Leadership / Manager Development
Diversity
Equity
Inclusion
Learning & Professional Development
Career Pathing
Team Dynamics
Change Management
Rewards, Promotions, & Team Structures
Internal Communications & Transparency
But rarely do I see companies effectively leveraging this data to make actionable changes in their businesses.
Why is that?
Well, change is hard. Or at least, it can feel very hard. And especially when we throw in the emotional component that Talent leaders might face when reviewing the scores. Talent leaders might feel attacked or feel like a failure based on the engagement survey scores.
But that’s where we’re getting engagement survey scores wrong.
These scores are not solely the responsibility of the Talent team to fix or influence. It is time for managers, directors, VPs, Executives to all get in on the review of engagement survey scores. Entire sections are devoted to both executive leadership and the manager-employee relationship.
For Executives:
Scores can help executives to determine what departments are struggling. Your talent team can provide your data segmented by department and even by tenure of your team. This can help you round out your understanding of an underperforming team.
Perhaps their performance issues are less about the tools they have access to and more about team dynamics that are stunting their motivation and innovation capacity.
There’s also typically questions directly related to how executives communicate vision and strategy. These questions help you know how you can continue to improve how you communicate, inspire, and motivate your entire company.
For Managers:
Your talent team can give you access to your scores on critical questions like “My manager supports me” or “I get clear feedback from my manager on a regular basis”.
Where you see lower scores, that’s where you need to make some improvements in how you are connecting with and relating to your team.
You might feel like you’re doing a lot to support your team or give frequent, clear feedback.
Just because you feel like you’re doing it doesn’t mean that your team feels that way.
And that’s what’s key. In your relationship with your employees, it’s not about you. It is about them.
Using these engagement survey scores as a guiding light, you can listen better to your team. You can adapt your leadership based on this data. Consider it your manager score card.
So before you postpone that engagement survey again, I want you to really consider how helpful this data would be to you and the rest of your leadership.
Advocate for these surveys -- whether you’re in talent, the executive team, or a manager. This data can be incredibly revealing, and the roadmap it provides is invaluable for all leaders.
TAKE ACTION
Ask your Talent team or executive to share the scores with you. Let them know that you’re interested in learning more and want to partner with them to improve your scores.
Worried about what you’ll do to respond to your engagement scores once you have them? Check out this free eBook to support you as you review your scores so you don’t make these common mistakes in your responses.
“Once you break past your own limited worldview and lens, your awareness changes. Awareness is the first step towards behavior change.”
(c) 2019 - 2024 Katie McLaughlin, McLaughlin Method
