The authors own experience of managing engagement surveys and initiatives left us dissatisfied with the ultimate outcomes achieved in organizations.
Our clients were telling us they needed something different for employee engagement. These needs varied from client to client – depending on whether they were large or small organizations.
However, one common theme prevailed.
As the paradigm shift contributes to transformational changes within organizations, we were left with some questions, “what is the value of employee opinion and insights in current times, and is still worthwhile to invest in employee engagement?”. We embarked on this research with an open mind on the results and outcomes.
Our research showed that organizations, especially larger organizations, still undertake traditional engagement surveys, typically annually (Figure 1), focusing on quantitative results. However, many organizations realize that traditional annual employee engagement surveys have limited value.
Annual or less frequent survey cycles that were adequate for yesterday’s business environment are not meeting today’s need for immediacy, transparency and flexibility. They require tremendous resources to plan, complete, analyze and communicate, for both the survey team and participants.
Nonetheless, organizations continue to administer traditional surveys for reasons including external benchmarking, tracking long term progress, and comparing unit specific performance.
In addition to employee engagement surveys, which are typically company-wide and annually administered, organizations are experimenting with new approaches in an attempt to provide more effective and agile ways to drive engagement.
For example, our research (Figure 1) showed that some organizations are planning or implementing pulse surveys, which are potentially faster and less resource intensive than company-wide surveys.
In our view, pulse surveys are a step in the right direction if they reduce the resources required to survey employees and provide more timely results. However we note that organizations conducting pulse surveys in addition to their traditional survey cycle will experience an increase rather than decrease in effort required.
*Link back to our Publication about this research.
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