Dig Deeper Into Your Employee Engagement Survey Results
It’s not uncommon for leaders to look at employee engagement survey results as the indicator of the health of their culture. However, there are two important questions to ask when evaluating your results:
What is the makeup of the segment of your staff that’s dissatisfied? If you are centering diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging as values, this should be one of the first questions that comes to your mind.
Who was most likely to respond to the survey in the first place? If your employees do not feel included or engaged, why would they bother to spend their time on a survey? If you establish a mechanism to gather feedback but you haven’t created an environment where everyone feels like their feedback is valued, your results are going to be skewed.
I share these points to offer two tips for consideration. First, don’t rely solely on an employee survey to gauge employee sentiment about their experience at your organization. Consider complementing a survey with dialogue sessions led by skilled facilitators. In addition to providing more opportunity to contextualize feedback, facilitated discussions also signify leadership’s desire to uncover and address more than what can be gathered through a prescribed set of questions.
Second, if you do use a survey, make sure there is some demographic component incorporated into it so you have a chance at assessing the employee experience through the lens of diverse identities. If you have a workforce that is overwhelmingly male, for example, it would be critical to know whether the majority of unfavorable feedback came from female employees. That would show you where some of your DEIB efforts need to be focused.