We have reviewed the benefits of creating an environment where our workforce can thrive from a mental health and wellness perspective.
We also know we have certain legal requirements in areas that influence wellness such as ensuring that we don’t allow bullying or aggression in the workplace. You can read more about this here.
So, what is the reality at your workplace? Are toxic behaviours such as bullying, aggression or other destructive and dangerous behaviours a problem or embedded within your organisation?
An employee engagement survey is one way you can give your employees a voice and allow them to feel like they can participate in continuous improvement and serves as an important input into decisions around the culture that we want to create.
Employee satisfaction or engagement surveys can tell us crucial information about what is going on in the business. Surveys do not solve problems, they do however shine a light on them and serve as an excellent input into setting strategy to improve wellness.
Employee engagement surveys are generally conducted annually, addressing weighty topics like leadership effectiveness, values and purpose.
The main purpose of an employee survey is to gain deep insights into what is driving engagement, and what could possibly be hindering it.
To get the most out of them, we need to ensure we approach surveys with these three key benefits front of mind:
As an important side note — if we continually survey our people without taking steps to address the issues that they highlight in a transparent way, our people become even more disillusioned with us and we risk undermining employee trust.
Reporting and Communication of Results
Heat-map style of reporting can support the identification of where the culture is strong and where it may need reinforcement, particularly in large organisations with different divisions.
Using your employee surveys as the source of data on your employee experience and culture allows you to reset goals and determine where more embedding of desired behaviours needs to occur. From initial discussions when initiating a survey, planning should include a communication and consultation phase.
Be prepared to set up working groups to focus on areas of concern to address problematic and destructive behaviours that may be uncovered by your survey. Involving your people in the solution will contribute to their feeling listened to and valued - both huge motivators and likely to improve organisational wellness.
“Engaged employees make it a point to show up to work and do more work — highly engaged business units realize a 41% reduction in absenteeism and a 17% increase in productivity.”
If you are going to ask your people to have a voice, ensure you feed back the results.
A survey sample of 216 health care employees from the United States, Canada, and Japan for an Employee Engagement and Well-Being study results (2) revealed that
“high engagement group employees demonstrated higher psychological well-being and personal accomplishment, whereas low engagement group employees exhibited higher emotional exhaustion and depersonalisation.”
Call To Action
Before we set strategy, we need to be honest about where we sit as a business.
An employee engagement survey helps us to look honestly in the mirror to gain an understanding of how we stack up in relation to that, which will give us an indication of how much work we have to do. The following steps are integral to your success.
Ensure your senior leadership team is onboard with your plan to conduct an employee engagement survey. This is an important first step as you will need your senior leadership team to drive participation and follow up activities.
Conduct an employee engagement survey to determine how much you have to do, and in what areas.
Share the results of the survey with your employees. Openly sharing the results builds trust, even if the results are not where you want them to be. It can be potentially damaging to do an employee engagement survey if you are not prepared to make the results transparent.
Of course, the next step is to also communicate the actions, even if some of the issues cannot be immediately resolved.
Taking it Further
If you have an employee engagement survey firmly in place, a few checkpoints are:
Are your engagement scores consistently high across all divisions? If not, what do you do to address areas of weaker engagement?
What communication protocols do you have around sharing results?
Do you monitor results by division and support leaders to communicate and put action plans in place around the feedback?
The ongoing work we undertake around conducting Employee Engagement Surveys and analysing the results on a strategic level will have a great impact on our efforts to achieve a mentally healthy and engaged workforce.
Where to now?
Sources
Employee Engagement and Well-Being: A Moderation Model and Implications for Practice, Brad Shuck and Thomas G. Reio Jr., (Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies 2014).
Brad Shuck and Thomas G. Reio Jr.
(Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies 2014).