Oh please, not another survey!
How do you gather quality data when your people have survey fatigue? Getting a decent response rate to employee surveys can be quite a hurdle. Yet, you need meaningful data if you’re going to make a strong HR business case.
The business case you want to build might be for a strategic activity, e.g. an investment in leadership development or DEIB.
On the other hand, it might be more operational or tactical, e.g. to make the case to an individual leader or manager to change their behaviour.
Either way, you need buy-in to the importance of learning from employees and then – crucially – acting upon the data.
How do your leaders and managers see your employee surveys?
a) as a tool to help them, that they eagerly await so that they can act on the results?
b) as a tick in the box exercise that they tolerate but don’t really buy into?
c) as a stick for HR to beat them with?
Unless you’ve picked a), you’ve got an opportunity to get more value. Large surveys, e.g. employee engagement, represent a massive investment, especially when you appreciate that the value comes from actions taken as a result – and that means a lot of legwork from HR in sharing and debating the feedback with stakeholders.
It can all fall flat when leaders aren’t really interested.
How do you create the appetite for them to embrace learning from employees?
How about asking them first what THEY would like to find out about? You can then build a continuous employee listening strategy that gathers that data across the year – paced, timed and targeted.
Our own George Naylor is a guru of all kinds of organisation research and has developed a short targeting survey which asks leaders what THEY would be interested in learning about from their team. It’s a great starting point to enable you to refresh your approach.
Contact us for a no obligation chat to find out more.
