Work environment measures how comfortable an employee is with their ability to perform in their role. It assesses an employee’s view on whether your organization provides them with the right tools, equipment, and training to do their job.

Professional growth refers to the attitude that an employee has toward personal growth, development and career.

Performance feedback measures employees expectations on how they will be evaluated and if they feel that they receive fair and regular feedback.

Immediate management determines how your employee feels about their relationship with direct supervisors (manager, foreman, etc.).

Compensation measures if your employee is satisfied with their compensation when compared to market conditions.

Work/life balance measures whether an employee feels that they have a good work/life balance. Do they feel they have control over their workload?

Teamwork explores if your employee feels that there is fair cooperation, collaboration, and team spirit at your organization.

Diversity & inclusion measures how your employee feels about diversity and inclusion. Are employees of a different race, gender, age, sexual orientation, or religion being treated differently?

Innovation explores whether your employee thinks that your organization is committed to high quality work. Can they learn from mistakes? Are they afraid of trying something new out of fear of being blamed for mistakes.

Information and communication measures if your employee thinks that they have the right information to do their job.

Senior leadership assesses whether your employee respects your organization’s leaders.

Organizational vision explores if your employee feels a sense of purpose in your organization. Do they understand your corporate goals/targets? Do they feel that they contribute to the goals?

Engagement measures six attitudes, that together are the best predictors of an employee’s willingness to contribute extra effort simply because they want to.

The post How Do We Measure Employee Engagement? appeared first on TalentMap.

The difficulty of employee engagement survey action planning might come as a surprise. It takes a champion or three to make it happen. A good many champions of employee engagement have wrestled with some of the best oppositional managers. These naysayers are everywhere.

Getting management to roll up their sleeves post-survey may seem far more taxing than it was, on reflection, to sell your executive leadership team on the merits of an employee engagement survey. In those earlier days, you could point to supportive literature more plentiful than there are days in a decade; scientific studies, academic papers, strategic business reports all praising this tool of the HR trade.

Deciding on strategy, selecting the right kinds of questions, developing formats and rolling out the survey, well, all that seemed relatively easy too.  Comparatively speaking. Again, all kinds or viable resources showed you “how to” design and execute employee surveys, topic by topic, step by step.

Now, the survey’s behind you and results are in. Employees have had their say. They’re ready and eager for change.  You’re ready and eager to move into action. But your real change agents – team leaders, supervisors, front-line and middle managers, even some senior executives aren’t all on board.  Questions and objections surface like oil on vinegar. What do these numbers mean to me? My team? My department? My division? What am I meant to do with this information? Where do I start? We don’t have time for this kind of thing. It’s not relevant to what we do.  Meetings are too time-consuming; productivity will suffer.

Unfortunately, there’s a dearth of information to guide you through next steps.  Nothing as prolific as the resources that helped get you to this point. That’s where post-survey consulting and professionally facilitated action planning workshops can ease the transition from thought to action.

TalentMap has observed three common post-survey difficulties and recommends you prepare for these hurdles before they become full-stop obstacles.

1. Differing views and priorities

You can anticipate three distinct management responses post-survey

• Those who buy-in completely and unequivocally
• Those who don’t (surveys are a waste of resources, why do we even bother)
• Those somewhere in between who cite time as their chief concern.

Your number one job is to find who sits where and to coach them accordingly.

2. Inexperience

Your executive leaders usually have the advantage of high-level presentations and reports that delve into findings and pinpoint actionable areas. For the rest of management that’s not necessarily the case. Turning employee engagement survey action planning loose on the whole organization means making sure basic knowledge and skills are covered and in place across all levels of management, from how to read and interpret, understand and communicate survey findings to running effective meetings and smoothing the way for change.

3. Trade-off thinking

“Yeah but… if we do this we’ll forfeit that.  It’s either our regular work or employee engagement.” You know both co-exist quite nicely and lead to improvements. It’s a question of sharing this knowledge convincingly and demonstrating how to get there.

Don’t sweat these difficulties. Just know what to expect and plan your next steps. Prepare to wrestle down objections and step into the fray ready for action – with TalentMap coaching from your corner.

The post Plan for Engagement Survey Action Planning Difficulties appeared first on TalentMap.

Open-ended survey questions are an equally critical learning tool in the work world. They give organizations and leadership a glimpse at how employees think, perceive, and feel about certain subjects and why.

Because open-ended questions involve a greater amount of a respondent’s time and effort, the secret is to ask strategically, thoughtfully, and sparingly. You don’t want to overwhelm and exhaust your employees when launching an engagement survey.

To establish a benchmark for tracking and monitoring trends over time, closed questions are your best choice. A set of fixed responses makes it easy to tally, calculate percentages and compare results:

 I would like to see organization [xyz] change its approach to remote working:

Strongly Agree   Agree Neutral Disagree   Strongly Disagree

But when it comes to open-ended survey questions — the why, what for and how queries — you’re looking at an altogether different beast.

The type and wording of open-ended survey questions draw out different kinds of answers and insights.

Whimsical open-ended questions give permission to be creative yet honest:

If you were granted one wish by the Job Genie, what single workplace change would you request? 

Pointed open-ended questions typically get straight forward responses:

What one workplace change would you like to see?

Like just about everything there are two sides around the question of an open-ended question. On the downside:

• Answers come in different degrees of detail; some responses are vague, others long-winded
• Misinterpreted questions can lead to irrelevant answers
• Some employees may feel intimidated by questions or have difficulty expressing themselves; literate, articulate employees have a distinct advantage over those less so
• Collating and analyzing written responses is a time-consuming and difficult process; making sense of tens of hundreds or thousands of comments needs resources to review and thematically categorize answers, subjectivity can become an issue.

On the flip side, open-ended survey questions:

• Give deeper insights into complex issues
• Invite an unlimited number of answers which can lead to unanticipated findings
• Invite creativity, self-expression and a richness of detail
• Employees can use their own words to qualify and clarify responses, share feelings, attitudes and their level of understanding around a subject — revealing thought processes, logic, reasoning, language preferences and a wealth of other information
• Can be used for secondary analysis to give contextual information (correlating responses geographically, by function or department, age, gender, length of service, and so on)
• Avoids the bias that may result from pre-set answer options.

The post The Value of Open-Ended Survey Questions appeared first on TalentMap.