In the current climate where shifting political sands and economic uncertainty are making life difficult for businesses across a multitude of sectors, recent research indicated that a quarter of UK HR professionals believe increasing staff engagement is a top priority for 2017. Looking after staff is after all something fully within your control.
The study, by a global HR consultancy, also indicated as many as 96% of employees want to be recognised and rewarded for their contribution to their organisation beyond its financial results and activity metrics; with 59% ranking their health above wealth or career.
With employee engagement impacting on everything from fitness and wellbeing through to productivity and profitability, understanding how motivated, committed and satisfied your workforce is can make a real impact on your bottom line.
Baseline data provides a snapshot of how your organisation is working for those on the inside. It can help compare departments or business units, pinpoint problem areas and celebrate successes; or identify emerging themes across your company.
Critically, if you ask for honesty and are prepared to take the results on the chin, they can be a valuable part of the HR toolkit for gleaning uncensored intelligence about what is really influencing your workforce. The question is how do you ensure you get it?
One of the biggest challenges of internal surveys is getting employees to respond. If the ultimate goal is to gather information to support business objectives, then a good pool of data must be collected.
Employees may worry about repercussions from sticking their neck out, some companies don’t treat the answers confidentially while others don’t really want feedback unless it’s telling them something positive. All of these elements contribute to reduced participation rates and the issue is compounded when a large percentage of your employee base works remotely and is not in close proximity to their supervisors.
A good external provider can help companies achieve higher participation rates than are possible with a simple internal survey. Outsourcing to an independent third party gives employees security that their responses will remain anonymous, thereby increasing participation.
Bringing in the experts will also increase the quality of the data received as staff are more likely to provide open, no-holds barred feedback if they know their identity can’t be traced. The right partner will even help you understand how to interpret what your staff are telling you by breaking down the information by location, team, sector – whatever the required criteria.
With a good response rate and accurate information, companies can glean actionable, evidence-based data to support strategic decision making and realise the true value of their HR investment.
Click here for information on the staff engagement surveys that we can conduct.