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David Woods, 06 Oct 2011
Employers must take action to motivate and equip their managers to act on engagement surveys, according to a report by Aon Hewitt.
Data from Aon Hewitt's European Engagement database shows the vast majority of employees across the UK and Europe believe that their employers view employee engagement as a tick box exercise, with only 18% of employees strongly believing that survey results will be will be acted upon.
To gain a better understanding of the role that managers could and should play, Aon Hewitt ran a European research project in June 2011, which canvassed the views of more than 700 managers across 10 European countries, resulting in the report Managers: Your Strongest or Weakest Link in Driving Employee Engagement?
The report shows nearly half (47%) of managers indicated that they spend only two to five days a year on activities relating to their annual engagement survey.
Aon Hewitt's research confirmed organisations with a strong engagement culture were much more successful at transforming employee surveys into actions. For example, managers who reviewed their survey results and identified actions had an overall engagement score of 63%, versus 27% for managers who had access to results but did not even review them.
Furthermore, Aon Hewitt's Best Employers Study (an annually updated global database) shows that organisations which are considered most successful in terms of financial performance and strong levels of engagement are more likely to empower their managers to provide their team members with the support they need: 75% versus 60% in other organisations.
Jenny Merry, UK Engagement Practice Leader at Aon Hewitt, said: "It's clear that while most organisations monitor levels of employee engagement, many are failing to act effectively on the findings. Against a backdrop of economic uncertainty and salary increases below the level of inflation, ensuring your workforce feels supported and engaged is more critical than ever before. An engaged workforce will be more productive, more efficient and more likely to help the company reach its targets.
"Despite this, many organisations are failing to view employee engagement as anything other than an annual event, or checklist item. As well as yearly measurement and action planning, there should be a strong and prevailing employee engagement philosophy and strategy which reinforces the impact that having engaged employees can make on performance.
"One important link that many organisations are failing to leverage is the role of middle managers in stimulating engagement. These are the people who have daily contact with employees and therefore have a critical role to play in influencing, engaging and empowering teams.
"The well-worn phrase "people join organisations and leave managers" is not the whole story; people leave organisations which have not properly equipped managers to be engaging. Managers could and should have a positive impact on employee engagement. With careful planning, expectation setting and support for managers, it is possible to make this a reality."
The results are based on a survey of 730 managers across Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. The survey took place in June 2011.
7 comments on this article |
Diana Hogbin-Mills 06 Oct 2011
I agree with many of the points made in this article and I am going to go further and say that annual engagement surveys as we know them are typically long and cumbersome and as such outdated. The reams and reams of charts and statistics that are produced from annual engagement surveys do not encourage the fundamental behaviour that drives engagement, talking to people, and this is why many line mangers typically fail to act on them. With advances in technology, the arrival of social media and concepts such as gamification, nowcasting and crowd sourcing, organisations no longer need to push annual surveys and hope managers do something about it. Instead its now possible that organisations can excite employees to provide feedback on their engagement levels then create an empowering environment where employees and managers jointly solve the engagement issues, and along the way identify who are the most influential people at driving and delivering improved engagement levels. It's more than possible to make it a reality, and one that organisations are already starting to deliver on.
Derek Irvine, Globoforce 07 Oct 2011
Too often, leadership assumes achieving a high employee engagement score is enough. But an engagement survey is like any other – surveys without action are less than useless to employees. It’s what leadership does with their findings from the surveys that matter the most to employees. Furthermore, highly engaged employees are not necessarily more likely to stay – unless you create a culture of recognition centered on meaningful work, teamwork, trust and respect. I wrote more about this connection between taking action, employee engagement and retention here: http://recognizethisblog.com/2011/08/engaged-employees-are-still-a-flight-risk-unless%E2%80%A6/
BenE 10 Oct 2011
These findings again highlight the fact that, while the number of companies running all-employee surveys continues to grow, many are still failing to do anything meaningful with the results. Being able to point to a high engagement score is one thing, but to be successful in the longer term, companies must act on these valuable insights from workers. A big part of the problem is that action planning is an after-thought for many companies and it can be unclear who 'owns' plans. Companies must consider action planning earlier - this paper gives useful advice on the subject: http://www.etsplc.com/events/sap1/survey-action-planning.aspx
Jonathan Wilson 10 Oct 2011
Conducting surveys gives an illusion of interest and activity, but surveys are a very poor way discovering or exploring people's real feelings. Worse, asking and failing to act on the answers is a sure way of disengaging people and reinforcing their cynicism. Real dialogue is a much better way than traditional surveying. There is an Unconference on Engagement in London on 23 November. Details at dumbthings.co.uk
Sean Trainor 17 Oct 2011
Who is really at fault here? Maybe if whoever designed these 'engagement' surveys had thought through the unintented consequences, they would have tried a different approach. Now that people understand that surveys dont improve employee engagement, these companies are looking for someone to blame. Guess what? They found the scapegoats through a survey. You couldn't make it up.
Peter Hutton 18 Oct 2011
There are three reasons why these results come as no surprise and they all have to do with the limitations of the survey instruments ; typically these now consist of little more than a battery of statements and an agree/disagree scale. These are often standardised statements with little attempt to customise them to the individual organisation; no wonder staff perceive them as tick box exercises. Moreover, such surveys only measures staff attitudes, and are not designed to identify what is causing staff to hold those attitudes. Finally, such surveys have encouraged the view that employee engagement is only about staff attitudes suggesting that if only the business can get staff attitudes right, then everything else will fall into place. What management should be asking is ‘what do we want our staff to engage with?’ They will then realise that there are many facets of the business that staff need to engage with, and that employee surveys that only focus on generic attitudes fail to identify the real shortfalls in employee engagement. As a researcher myself, I am a strong believer in the value that well-designed surveys can add to a business. But management needs to move away from the idea that improving employee engagement is about increasing its scores on a handful of attitude measures and use surveys in a more intelligent way to understand the underlying issues that are stopping their employees and their businesses achieving their full potential.
Phil Parramore 09 Feb 2012
I am grateful to the author for providing an article so rich in content and to those who have commented and provided great insight into such a vital topic. There are clearly a variety of opinions about how valuable an Employee Engagement culture is and how it should be managed. Surely though most must agree that to have the greatest chance of optimising the performance of their people, and so create a high performance culture, organisations must regularly take the temperature of their workforce. The regularity of formal surveys has to vary dependent on a number of factors including the size of the business. As a former employee of a very large Government Department a lengthy staff survey was critical. However the questions asked that directly correlated to engagement factors was a small proportion of the total. That said in a very small business, it makes much more sense to have a "chat over a coffee" to gauge feelings of the workforce. I agree that asking questions in surveys inspires high expectations from employees, and so it is critical that results are 1) considered and 2) acted on if appropriate. Communications are also key in this - employees quite rightly want to see that their responses are considered. Management must make substantial efforts to communicate the results, construct an action plan, which is communicated to staff and implemented. And having done that the pulse of the organisation must be taken again, to see if the intended changes have been embedded correctly, and, critically, what other changes need to be made. Shorter pulse surveys and focus groups can work well as interim measures, until it is time for the more formal survey to be run again Measure, Act, Measure again.... is a continuous cycle to get the high engagement scores needed to boost the productivity and profitability of your business. Yes! it costs to administer approaches like this, but the benefits of having a highly engaged workforce, rather than a disengaged one are clear to see. Can you afford not to do this?
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