Engaged employees want to be there

When employees feel valued and respected for their contributions at work and they know that their employer is looking out for their best interests, they want to be there. They like to be there. The end result? Statistics prove that absenteeism and turnover on the job drops — big time! As noted in the Harvard Business Review report entitled, The Impact of Employee Engagement on Performance, “…business leaders know that having a high-performing workforce is essential for growth and survival. They recognize that a highly engaged workforce can increase innovation, productivity, and bottom-line performance while reducing costs related to hiring and retention in highly competitive talent markets.”

Engaged employees give more

An article in Engagedly.com, titled, The Impact of Employee Engagement on Productivity, says that Gallup research has found that when employees are engaged, they’re 21 per cent more productive. Also, engaged employees are innovative. They’re more likely to think of ways they can do better. Plus, when employees are happier, they work harder to give excellent service. Better service means organizations get things done faster and more correctly. That boosts the organization’s reputation with both colleagues and outsiders. Lastly, when employees feel good about their responsibilities, they want to go above and beyond – to give back.

Engaged employees increase productivity

There’s no doubt about it. Just ask anyone who has worked in a boring job that they hate. If you don’t like what you’re doing and who you’re doing it for, there’s a huge chance you’ll slack off while you’re doing it. Long term: That affects the bottom line for the organization. But when employees feel good about what they’re doing they easily give it all they’ve got.

According to an article in the Harvard Business Review called, Employee Engagement Does More Than Just Boost Productivity, it just makes sense. “Engaged employees are more attentive and vigilant. They look out for the needs of their coworkers and the overall enterprise, because they personally ‘own’ the result of their work and that of the organization.” So organizations that want better performance would be smart to look at their employees and start finding ways to engage them.

The post Does Employee Engagement Improve Business Performance? appeared first on TalentMap.

Common survey mistakes 

The following are common mistakes many organizations make when planning and executing their surveys:

1. Not having a clear strategy

As Peter Barron Stark points out in his video called, “Why Are You Conducting an Employee Engagement Survey,” organizations should figure out why they’re doing the survey and what they want to achieve when it’s done — before they start.

2. Only conducting surveys once a year

Employee engagement measurements should not only happen once in a while. Measurements should happen many times a year because it always changes. 

3. Measuring satisfaction instead of engagement

Surveys often measure employee satisfaction and that’s not employee engagement. People may be satisfied with their benefits or pay, but that has nothing to do with engagement. Engagement is about their overall emotional commitment to the organization.

4. Making surveys too long

When surveys are too long, people get exhausted and then their responses aren’t reliable. Keep it down to 30 questions at the most.

5. Not providing actionable solutions

Survey results need to be shared with staff and action needs to be taken to fix any issues found. If this does not happen, it’s best not to put out a survey at all, because employee engagement will go down if nothing is done with survey results

Tips to quickly measure some of your employees’ engagement

A well planned and executed survey can do wonders for measuring employee engagement. Here are some easy ways to continue measuring engagement between surveys:

• Run focus groups. Ask people what they’re experiencing on the job. Find out what they like and what’s not working for them. Then, stay engaged with the employees after you apply their ideas and changes and ask them what they think.  
• Have weekly one-on-one meetings with employees and ask them how they’re doing, what is going on with their work and if they have any ideas, complaints or suggestions.

More to come on engagement

Research in employee engagement keeps on growing. Organizations are learning more about what works best and how to reach employees and get better results. You can count on discovering more ways to connect with and keep your valuable employees.  

The post Top 5 Mistakes To Avoid In Your Next Engagement Survey appeared first on TalentMap.

High employee engagement levels increase an employee’s odds of success. Teams that get engagement right improve their odds of having higher performance on the important outcomes that organizations care about most. When comparing top-performing teams against bottom-performing teams in Gallup’s database, the average differences were: 

• 10% higher customer ratings
• 22% greater profitability
• 21% greater productivity
• 25% less turnover (high-turnover organizations)
• 65% less turnover (low-turnover organizations)
• 48% fewer safety incidents
• 28% less shrinkage (theft by employees)
• 37% less absenteeism
• 41% fewer patient safety incidents
• 41% fewer quality defects

The statistics show that the greater the percentage of engaged employees and teams in an organization, the more likely it is to meet – and potentially exceed – its business goals. This is why measuring employee engagement is so important.

The post Why Measuring Employee Engagement is Critical appeared first on TalentMap.

On the one hand, there are those who forecast a mass exodus of baby boomers from the workforce. The predicted result is a huge talent gap.  A fiercely competitive talent market. Employees can be had, they caution, but, at a premium.

Others suggest ever evolving technologies like robotics and artificial intelligence will usurp human workers. Professionals not exempted.  Business journalist, Don Pittis, writes that a dearth of employment opportunities looms on the horizon. In this dystopian world, landing and holding a job will become the “status symbol”¹ of the future.

Reality likely resides somewhere in between.

As organizations volley between the automation age and the human age, traditional notions of employment and workplace are ever-morphing. Tour of duty workers are on the rise, driven in part by a growing majority of Millennials and their (semi)retired Baby Boom predecessors. These solopreneurs want more autonomy over why, when and where they work. In turn, organizations save benefit and pension expenses by contracting transient staff or farming out one-off projects. And like air is to fire, technology feeds into this workplace evolution, reducing costs even further. Think ATMs and online banking vs. front line tellers, government service kiosks and electronic licensing vs. frontline public service staff, shopping online vs. storefront retail.

While manufacturing and clerical jobs have been hardest hit so far, technology creep is edging further afield. “How Technology is Destroying Jobs” headlines a 2013 MIT Technology Review article. W. Brian Arthur, a former economics professor at Stanford University is quoted as saying “digital versions of human intelligence” are increasingly replacing even those jobs once thought to require people. “It will change every profession in ways we have barely seen yet.”²

In this minefield of real change and potential what ifs, what matters most is making the most of the workforce you have now and laying the framework together for what’s ahead. Using employee engagement surveys opens the door to actionable insights. But those surveys are just the beginning.

• Your organization sends out a survey
• People get excited
• They contribute
• Nothing happens
• They believe you’re not listening
• Next time, survey response rates drop

When input is sought, and given, employees are going to have expectations around hearing results.  Not doing anything, shelving findings, turning to other priorities, impacts negatively. What starts as an engaging intention becomes an utterly disengaging failure. Future employee survey response rates plummet. Morale too. Absenteeism and retention also suffer, say nothing of productivity.

On the flip side, following up on survey data can have a profound effect on engagement and efficiency, especially if it’s inclusive and bottom-up oriented. What about thoughtfully crafted strategic directives meant to cascade top down?  Bottom up – really? Unconventional thinking for unconventional times? No. After years of study, TalentMap research shows management alone can’t fix issues, particularly those that surface from employee surveys. Change comes fromemployees; the process needs to include and build from as diverse a group of employees as possible.

Goals and objectives come from the employee engagement survey

1. Form an employee engagement taskforce
2. Review findings
3. Set goals
4. Set objectives
5. Identify actions/tasks to meet objectives

Convening an employee task force is a good place to start.  A group of one dozen employees from all areas and levels of the organization is recommended, including one or two members of the executive team. That’s crucial. Leadership participation adds reality and advocacy into the equation.  Actionable ideas can be reached based on what’s legitimately achievable; what the organization can and cannot do. And when it comes time to advocate from the boardroom floor, these leaders can present task force recommendations from a level playing field to their executive peers.

The survey task force is not the place to lead, however, it’s the place to listen and participate.  Engagement, after all, comes from within each employee, an internalized, personal connection. Strong, good leaders will understand this, make people feel comfortable, free to innovate, engaged.

Indeed, how and what an organization does with employee insights is a huge part of the experiential workplace makeover. Numerous studies including data amassed from TalentMap’s Jump-Start workshops, demonstrate that regardless of what comes out of an action planning process, acting on those insights has a direct, uplifting impact on the broader employee work experience.

Communicate! Communicate! Communicate!

Report findings, goals, and actions. Make it real. Start with the simpler goals and activities that can produce quick outcomes. Then move onto more difficult challenges. And communicate. Always communicate. HR or internal communications play an important visibility role. Across the organization everyone will see that something has been achieved because of employee input. That openness and transparency wins credibility when solutions come out, and inspiration, when results come in.

Now back to those threats posed by real-now changes and potential down the road what ifs.

Listen to what’s being said out there by your own people. Analyze trends, together. And act on those findings in unison. As the old adage goes, there’s strength in numbers and it’s strong organizations that will prevail and grow in the years and decades to come.

1 http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/automation-work-status-leisure-despair-1.4039467

2 https://www.technologyreview.com/s/515926/how-technology-is-destroying-jobs/

The post The Importance of Acting on Survey Data appeared first on TalentMap.

More recently we arrived at our current understanding of employee engagement through a combination of our 14 years of “in the field research” with over 500 organizations and ongoing review of research published and presented by leading practitioners and academics in a variety of conferences and journals each year.  Today our employee engagement model combines our 10 years of experience with the “best of breed” research conducted by experts in the field, namely Dan Denison, David Maister, Gallup and Jim Collins.

We consciously selected the work of these experts to augment our research model because they developed four well-documented empirical models linking employee feedback to organizational performance.

The first empirical model was produced and published by Dr. Dan Denison formerly of the University of Michigan Business School, and currently Professor of Organizational Development at IMD (International Institute for Management Development) in Lausanne, Switzerland. He measured ‘Organization Culture’ across hundreds of organizations and found that the lowest 10% of companies produced an ROI of only 6% while the top 10% produced an ROI of 21%.

The second empirical model was created by Dr. David Maister formerly of Harvard Business School. He surveyed 29 firms in 15 countries to determine whether positive employee attitudes correlate with corporate success. He was able to show that in many companies, it truly is attitudes that drive financial results and organizational success, and not, as widely believed, the other way round.

The third empirical model was developed by Gallup using an impressive sample size of eighty thousand managers and one million staff from 400 companies. Gallup used its expertise in survey research to link employee engagement to business performance.

Finally, the work produced by Jim Collins in “Good to Great” is relevant.  Although his work does not include specific results of employee surveys, it provides an impressive empirical framework to improve business performance. We used his framework to inform some of our business performance dimensions, such as Innovation and Customer/Client/Patient Service.

Since TalentMap first developed its first job satisfaction survey and subsequent employee engagement surveys, a growing and remarkable body of academic and practitioner literature has built proof, beyond a reasonable doubt, of the power of an engaged workforce to deliver superior business results.

The post What is the TalentMap Engagement Questionnaire Based On? appeared first on TalentMap.

What’s wrong with this picture?

It’s all a matter of how your organization views employee surveys. A distant, high-level view can easily reduce perceptions of this valuable tool to little more than a handful of misguided notions, commonly:

• an administrative burden in terms of time and effort
• the opening of floodgates for employees to vent and complain
• the potential undermining of established cultural norms
• feedback largely irrelevant to the broader good of the organization
• nominal if any actionable outcomes, resulting in…
• no real purpose other than to frustrate and discourage employees.

Organizations fogged in by a mistaken sense of surveys miss out on powerful (and profitable) employee engagement possibilities.

It doesn’t take standing on a mountain top wearing Woody specs to see the clear advantages of employee surveys. It takes the kind of thinking that sees employee input as a fundamental strategic move. The kind of thinking that involves commitment and active participation from the leadership team, and the wider employee population thereafter. It takes the kind of thinking that:

• looks at the whole organization
• puts people first
• demonstrates how individual contributions impact the greater good
• recognizes the cause and effect relationship between people and performance
• solicits input, generates data, analyzes, and reports
• shares information with transparency to all
• facilitates strategic decision-making and action planning from the bottom up, not just top down
• gives employees a say in how their organization is run and how goals are achieved.

9 Best Practices for Strategic Success

TalentMap’s 2017 Wiley publication: Employee Engagement and Action Planning for Dummies, addresses erroneous perceptions, asserting, “When done correctly, surveys tell you exactly where engagement in your organization stands. Surveys can also pinpoint what areas you need to work on, and then allow you to see how far you’ve come after making improvements.”

Chapter three also offers up 9 best practices (a deliberate strategic approach) to clarify and drive employee survey and engagement success.

1. Start with strategy – design survey topics that measure progress against strategy and goals
2. Construct a model that makes explicit the links between employees-members-customers-clients and business objectives/profits
3. Develop a balanced approach and tie rewards and recognition to positive change
4. Learn how to understand, interpret and work with data from survey results
5. Focus improvement initiatives on the biggest strategic value rather than the lowest satisfaction scores
6. Reward and recognize managers when they use survey results to guide improvement initiatives
7. Provide team or unit leaders with their group’s survey results (a minimum of five respondents is a must – to protect anonymity)
8. Train managers to interpret, work with and communicate survey results to their staff
9. Conduct manager and facilitator team discussions to brainstorm and prioritize action plans and send recommendations to senior management for final endorsement. 

The post Seeing Employee Surveys Through a Clear Lens appeared first on TalentMap.

Twitter User: “So my “anonymous” employee survey needs my employee number? Yea, right “anonymous” for sure.” 

That Twitterer has a point.

The words “anonymous” and “confidential” are often used interchangeably but incorrectly in employee survey communications.

To be clear: anonymous comes from the Greek word, anonymia, meaning without a name, or nameless.

Confidential on the other hand refers to something that’s meant to be kept secret or private.

For example, your health records and conversations with your lawyer are handled with confidentiality through a series of rules that place restrictions on the sharing of such information.

In the data world, surveys can be anonymous or confidential. But not both.

If survey responses are intended to be anonymous, participants can’t be asked for any information that might reveal their identity. There are absolutely no identifying values. None. Not a one.

However, some kind of coding is required — like an employee number — when an organization wants to be able to look at employee survey results:

• By division or department or regional location
• Or is interested in breaking down different perceptions between union and non-union employees, or workers in blue collar jobs verses those in administration or sales.

Protecting the identity of employee survey respondents (aka confidentiality) is achieved best by using a third-party survey specialist like TalentMap to conduct, compile, analyze and store data.

TalentMap does not report employee engagement survey responses from departments made up of five people or less — under any circumstances — period.

• Open-ended employee comments are tabulated under thematic umbrellas.
• Data feedback from smaller groups is combined with similar functions.

Without a guarantee of confidentiality, employees have every right to be wary

Protecting respondent identities safeguards employees and employers from the possibility of reprisal and the ill-will that comes with.

If your organization’s survey participation rates are low, it’s likely your employees don’t know or understand how their identities are kept secret.

Twitter User: “Lol my boss just got a huge VP promotion even tho our entire dept got record low engagement scores in our employee survey.”

This recent Twitter dismally reflects a disengaged organization on several fronts.

What’s the point of an employee survey if feedback isn’t heeded? The whole exercise becomes counter-productive, creating an environment of disheartened, disconnected employees.

Chances are future survey response rates will be on a downward trajectory at this place, or at the very least, in this department.

Unless some fundamental things change, employee motivation and morale will follow suit.

Where is buy-in from the executive team, the President or CEO?

When an organization’s culture genuinely embraces employee engagement, management is trained and sensitized to its value.

Employee engagement scores are aligned with management performance reviews and career growth to reinforce the role leaders play in an engaging workplace.

What happens post-survey?

If the organization referenced in the Tweet simply goes through the motions, collecting feedback without acting on findings, it’s setting itself up for serious recruitment and retention, absenteeism and overall performance heartache.

Organizations with high employee survey participation year over year are on top of post-survey action planning, with supportive leadership paving the way.
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The post Why Aren’t Your Employees Filling Out Your Employee Surveys? appeared first on TalentMap.

Why upset the applecart?

Senior leaders are always looking for confirmation that proves the validity of your employee engagement programs. Can you justify efforts? Results? Return on investment? Does your vendor’s approach increase the strategic relationship between employee engagement initiatives and meaningful outcomes for your business and talent strategies?

The number one question you need to ask to decide if it’s time for a change: Are business results improving in tandem with employee engagement levels?

Reactions to an online editorial about firing your employee engagement vendor amplify this school of thought. One commentator notes: “If we can get our engagement scores to go up, then, theoretically, every desirable financial, operational and HR metric should go up with it because employee motivation affects everything going on inside our companies.”

Another emphatically reinforces this position: “Employee engagement measures are critical but if not coupled with the right process to enable manager development and employee connection to your organization – why bother? Frankly, everyone claims a validated set of question items. Clients paying [five or] six figures for ‘results’ should be asking specifically about the “change process” not the measurement process.”

That’s why a major retailer with more than 200 locations across the nation has a long-standing partnership with TalentMap dating back to 2008. The company keeps separate data related to store-by-store customer satisfaction and sales performance. Recent analysis to establish links showed:

In the U.S., where a hot economy is fueling a huge voluntary job exodus, there are clearly some deep-rooted issues that call for attention – sooner than later. To stay ahead of talent challenges that can bolster or bludgeon business outcomes your practical need to assess employee engagement, needs more-than-ever to be supported by an employee engagement partner with deep knowledge and strategic post-survey experience that delivers proven results.

• Employee engagement is very stable except in one area – immediate management
• In stores where employee engagement is high, sales and customer satisfaction are also high
• Conversely, in stores where engagement is low, sales and customer experience are low

Ergo, because of this data linkage analysis the client was able to conclude if they trained and changed management behavior on an as needed store-by-store basis, those engagement-targeted efforts would drive higher sales and customer satisfaction.

It’s natural not to want to change the status quo

For one, it takes too much time and effort to switch employee survey vendors. Right? Wrong.

The right employee engagement partner, one with a demonstrable track record, like TalentMap, will develop a detailed project plan, help you transition and get all your programs up and running, quickly and smoothly, within a specified timeframe or sooner.

What about all that data you’ve collected – are all those years of insights going to be lost?

Definitely not. Your historical information is the basis from which strategy evolves. With years of experience helping clients transition from one survey approach to another, TalentMap preserves and protects your data and integrates it along with your HRIS system into an easy to use survey and reporting tool.

The headache of having to retrain people on a new system seems such a waste of time. Why fix what’s not broken? If the data and outcomes you’re getting don’t sync with justifiable business improvements, something IS amiss. At TalentMap, you’re partnered with a dedicated, expert Project Manager who provides in-depth training on the platform. They not only train but troubleshoot and solve any roadblocks. They bring in other members of the TalentMap team to make sure you get the kinds of customization, benchmarks, reports and expertise you want, for the information and post-survey direction you need to guide department, geographic and corporate-wide change. Your personal Project Manager is committed to making sure there are no headaches. You’re supported every step of the way.

Invested in your success

TalentMap develops a strong working rapport with its partners, many lasting for nearly to two decades. We’re an extension of your organization. A professional team of project managers, data analysts, software engineers, subject matter experts and thought-leading engagement consultants who understand what works and what doesn’t. We want to be sure our efforts, collectively, align with your strategic objectives, workplace requirements and unique work culture, and that those efforts produce quantifiable business results.

You’ve got lots of options when it comes to asking your employees questions. The question is – are you seeing bottom line benefits? Maybe it is time for change.

The post The #1 Reason To Change Your Employee Survey Vendor appeared first on TalentMap.

Why is it important to know the difference?

Because in most cases, sourcing and hiring a survey partner, or DIY survey creation and implementation, falls to HR.

Making sure you’re working with a demonstrably valid and reliable survey will get you the kinds of data you can confidently tell others is, indeed, dependable. Knowing the difference between survey validity and reliability also brings clarity around why adding or modifying questions and wording, flow, and format from one survey to the next can have consequences.

Here’s why.

There are many components involved in survey design that contribute to high (or low) quality data. The time and effort it takes for respondents to complete a survey, number of points on the rating scale, phrasing of points, order of questions and layout are just a start.

Validity is concerned with the accuracy of your survey. It depends on asking questions that truly measure what is supposed to be measured. For instance, to what extent is an employee engagement survey actually measuring engagement?

Reliability on the other hand, is concerned with consistency or the degree to which the questions used in a survey elicit the same kind of information each time they’re asked. This is particularly important when it comes to tracking and comparing results with past internal surveys and benchmarks from external sources. Changes to wording or structure may result in different responses.

Consider this example of a misguided change to a valid question:

• Valid Question: My organization inspires me to do my best work.
• Misguided Question: I’m inspired to do my best work here at my organization.

While the two questions look almost interchangeable at the outset, the “valid” question has been tested many times, so we know how respondents interpret it, as one’s organization is the source of inspiration. Also, being a “valid” question, we expect results to be similar over time and any change would be due to a true change in the attitude, as opposed to changing interpretation.

On the other hand, the “misguided” question cannot be considered valid, since it has not been tested to see how respondents interpret it. Unless it is validated (through a debriefing exercise with many respondents, as well as predictability of response among similar randomly generated populations), we don’t know if it is truly measuring what is supposed to be measured. Is it measuring inspiration by the organization, by one’s work, or by both?

Although distinctly different, survey validity and reliability are inextricably linked.

Survey reliability on its own doesn’t establish validity.

An employee engagement survey can have high reliability – consistent responses year after year from one organization to the next – but low validity if the wrong questions are asked. When response data from a low validity survey is plotted on a graph, it doesn’t form the normal distribution shape of a bell curve where most data is near the middle but instead has scattered responses with large numbers at either end of the scale. Skewed responses suggest questions may not be properly structured. The result when validity becomes an issue? Bad information that doesn’t measure what you intended and jeopardizes sound decision-making.

Conversely, if results show responses are noticeably inconsistent year after year from one survey to the next yet there’s normal bell curve distribution; then your questions may be valid, but your survey reliability, not so much.

Several factors can interfere with survey reliability, among them changes in participants, environment, timing and the survey itself.  A survey conducted just after union negotiations or a layoff for instance, is likely to have impaired reliability. A seemingly insignificant change to how a question is asked, or the addition of a new section of questions that adds more time from respondents can impact reliability too.

That’s why reputable survey vendors review questionnaire statistical properties; following a comprehensive step-by-step analysis that looks at the attributes of every single item respondents are meant to answer.

The post Survey Reliability vs. Survery Validity: What’s the Big Deal? appeared first on TalentMap.

It really depends on the type of survey your organization wants to run and the reasons for doing so.

The Board and senior management of the Heart and Stroke Foundation, for example, started out thinking a full employee engagement survey every year was a great idea. As their survey partner, TalentMap recommended they pause on that and consider a pulse survey instead.

“It was an excellent recommendation,” says Sue Ward, Human Resources Manager for the Foundation. “We weren’t quite at the point where we were doing enough actions around survey results. Employees were going to say, ‘what are you doing with our feedback?’ The pulse survey took a quick look at whether employees recognized what we were doing, which gave us further guidance about what we needed to do next. We appreciated that recommendation. It worked out really, really well.”

There’s no arguing that the number one secret to avoid survey saturation is to pace the number of surveys you conduct with your organization’s ability to act on findings. Without demonstrable actions, employees are less likely to fill out a second or third or fourth survey. And when response rates drop, so does the quality of your data.

When significant numbers of employees opt not to respond to a survey it’s possible they share common viewpoints that aren’t being voiced. What you end up getting is unrepresentative feedback from a skewed sample, some of whom may be overly optimistic and others disgruntled pessimists

Employee survey fatigue sets in, and response rates fall for lots of other good reasons.

• Survey length – too long and respondents may lose interest, not answer as fully as they could, skip open-ended questions and possibly even drop-off midway through the questionnaire. Keep questions simple, clear and easy to answer.
• Relevance – whether customizing a survey or not, put yourself in the shoes of your workforce. Are questions applicable to office workers relevant to front-line staff or plant workers?  Use survey tools that skip questions or sections of a survey based on a respondent’s earlier answers.
• Asking the same question in different ways – redundancy is simply that: repetitive, superfluous, tiring and not all that useful.
• Timing and raison d’être – will either exasperate or conciliate. Ask for input at the right time, for example when change management is taking place, and at key times in an employee’s work cycle (newly hired, newly promoted, voluntarily leaving). Plan strategically. Define exactly what it is your organization needs to know and when. Keep questions focused. Use pulse surveys to fill in data gaps between full-blown engagement surveys to gauge what you’re doing well, and where your organization can do better.

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