Action Planning

Organizations can say all kinds of things without uttering a single word. One of the most perilous is leadership’s big silent hush following an employee survey. That quiet inaction can be a real killer.
The whole purpose behind surveying is to uncover information for future action planning. According to Jelke Bethlehem’s discussion paper, The Rise of Survey Sampling, earliest accounts of statistical gathering date back to ancient Babylonian times. You’d think, we’d have learned how to act on data by now. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case.
Don’t ask questions if your organization isn’t ready to hear the answers. And definitely don’t ask questions if your organization isn’t prepared to make plans and take action.
Numerous employee engagement studies show a lack of survey follow-up is one of the biggest mistakes organizations make. Employees need to know their opinions matter and expect to see management act on survey results. Putting survey results on the back burner or disregarding them all together leaves employees stewing over why they even bothered. That deafening silence is organizational self-sabotage.

TalentMap recommends a cyclical continuous improvement framework for employee engagement vis-à-vis surveys, action plans, and implementation. It’s about following basic steps: communicating results, focusing efforts on just a few priorities, working with employees to develop your action plan, implementing, and monitoring. If all is working as it should, in about 18 to 24 months it should be time to measure outcomes and repeat the process.