We are often asked by clients how to encourage people to respond to surveys. It is a logical question and we often respond by providing suggestions which centre on incentivising the process i.e. donations to charity for each completion or a prize draw for those who complete. However, whilst it is worthwhile encouraging responses and ensuring that there is adequate time and/or facilities to complete the survey for those who want to, the fact that in some organisations employees choose not to complete the survey is important feedback information in its own right. We often find in organisations where there has historically been a lack of commitment to feedback, poor communications and a lack of resulting action that survey completion rates are the lowest. In these circumstances, it is important to ask yourself what can be learnt from the poor response rate and what needs to change as a result to prevent repetition in the future. In this situation actions probably speak louder than words - the more action results from the surveys the more employees will see the value and the more completions you will see year on year if your commitment to the process is consistent. However, there are some organisations where communication is good and resulting action is promising plus response rates are generally high but there is still a significant level of non-completions – can anything be done to help with this? Well one possible solution may be to help reduce the resistance change. When surveys are rolled out some employees may dread what happens as a result – sceptical about what it will mean for them and change to their job role or working environment. How can you help those resistant to change get on board and relish the opportunity to get involved and have their say? According to an article in the Harvard Business Review (Ford & Ford, 2009), the first two things you can do when dealing with resistance to change are: boost awareness - when you are about to set a survey to go live you have probably spent ample time planning and processing it, for those not in the loop publicising the go live date way before may help them to adjust to and accept the process; return to purpose -  ensure that you communicate why you are doing this in addition to the what, when and how you are doing it  - state what you hope the outcome will mean and what commitment you are making, if possible provide a timeline so that individuals have something to anchor themselves to. By ensuring that employees who may be resistant to change are prepared for what to expect, when to expect it and what the potential outcomes may be, you may be able to help to engage some further employees into the process and improve response rates. A combination of incentives which help to motivate employees to complete surveys along with adherence to a systematic communication process before, during and after a survey may help to galvanise the workforce even further to provide a more united voice on which subsequent action can be based.   Reference: Ford, J. Ford, L. (2009). Decoding resistance to change, strong leaders can hear and learn from their critics. Harvard Business Review, April pp.99-103

It is interesting to note that many of the companies focused on improving their environmental performance often also show up on best places to work for lists too. In a time when governments are setting targets for reductions in carbon emissions and incentives for businesses to be more green it is difficult for many companies to ignore the trend and take no action. It is clear that by improving ones environmental performance businesses can cut costs, enhance their brand and have a more enthusiastic and engaged workforce (Golds, 2011). Catherine Golds, an Environmental Assessor and Head of NQA, states that the companies that make the largest environmental changes to their practices are those where “everyone from the CEO to the most junior member of staff is involved and committed to it”. This is why it appears that those companies that have the most engaged workforce make the biggest impact with regards to sustainability issues, as it is clear that the start to really engage your workforce needs to begin from the top down, where commitment to listening to employees wants and needs is heard.Golds, in her article in Development and Learning in Organisations, provides an example from PepsiCo UK, who achieved sending zero waste to landfill through effective staff engagement. Gold states that “achieving the company’s bold targets requires employee engagement at every level to drive change through the business”.We all know that engagement, alongside other outcomes, fosters better relationships between and across the organisation – it means that by focusing on engagement levels motivation and momentum for all sorts of organisation change programmes can be driven. Creating a foundation from where employee engagement levels can thrive can be beneficial to an organisation for many different reasons, not just for driving better environmental performance but for obtaining better performance generally and ultimately seeing improvements to the company bottom line.   Reference: Golds, C. (2011). Reaping the benefits of environmental awareness: how organizations areengaging their employees. Development & Learning in Organisations, Vol.25(2), pp18-20.

In February 2011, the CIPD ran their annual Employee Engagement Conference. It was here that all things engagement related were discussed, reviewed and sold! One of the things to come out of the Employee Engagement Conference was a subsequent discussion on the ‘employee voice’, where the prevailing opinion appears to be that the employee voice is essential to employee engagement, a ‘critical factor for success’. Interestingly, thrown into this debate was the involvement of Unions. It was considered that for some industries and organisations employee voice was valued through participation in the Union, whereby communication partnering processes could be implemented, providing a mechanism to listen to the ‘employee voice’.For companies that are global, it appears that the general consensus of opinion is group wide engagement strategies are not necessarily the correct solution. Employee engagement strategies should be owned locally as cross cultural behaviour and norms may be quite different across the business and a ‘one size fits all’ is not the key to engagement but listening to people within separate countries and providing a strategy that is bespoke for them is the key to making the employee voice work at a local level.At Employee Feedback we produce a number of reporting options at the end of the survey process whereby a review of the feedback for global companies can be seen, broken down by country, sector and/or division – whichever denominator the client would like. Reports of this kind often clearly show where the differences lie and it is often recommended that the key factors that remain the same through the business make part of the employee engagement strategy, then local strategy inclusion of elements where key differences occur can be made. We believe that this provides a ‘best of both worlds’ solution – providing a common foundation framework with local elements bolted on too. This provides a company wide strategy that also relates at a local level too, ensuring that the employee voice has been listened to in order to develop something that is relevant to them.Listening to the employee is nothing new or revolutionary, just resurgence in the discussion of the topic. It is often the case that we can get carried away with producing a policy, procedure, strategy and forget that it is often the people working for us that it will impact – the employee voice is indeed crucial if we are to get employee engagement right, we cannot engage people without asking employees their views and responding to their comments.

So, now we are continuing with our Rules of Engagement – creeping to Rule 4 which is all about looking at benchmarking your survey data. It is often the case that when looking at survey providers benchmarking is a consideration, which some believe is a ‘must have’. Many organisations want to know how they compare to their closest industry rivals and want to know that the survey provider holds data on industry specific groups. I first want to refer back to my previous blogs on defining employee engagement where I stated that there is not one all encompassing definition of employee engagement that is used by all organisations. It may be that each organisation requires a slightly different twist on employee engagement definitions and so various items will be included, removed or rewritten as necessary from the employee engagement item database. At Employee Feedback we hold a substantial amount of benchmarking data which we can use to compare clients with a norm for each item – thus the underlying change in definition does not make such an impact due to core items remaining unchanged between organisations. However, there is a troubling issue with employee trend data according to David Bowles, ex Vice-President at Hay Group. He suggests that many of the large survey giants holding data on employee engagement differ in terms of their overall reporting of trend data – some suggesting employees are more engaged now than before and others suggesting that there has been an overall decrease. What could be the possible reason for this, in some cases, quite large discrepancy? Well, Bowles suggests that a lack of definition along with varying response rates to surveys may be possible reasons for the overall discrepancy in employee engagement trend data. So where does that leave us in terms of benchmarking then? Well, it seems that the general consensus of many of those working in the employee engagement survey field is that ‘we might not have the answer...we have one answer, own own’ (Bowles, 2010). Therefore, the only trend seeming to be taking place is that clients are being encouraged to not rely on benchmarking data but develop their own internal benchmarking data where the focus is on the client’s results and how they compare internally across divisions, locations, departments etc. At Employee Feedback, we would concur with this view. Whilst we are, of course, happy to provide comparison norms from our extensive benchmarking library, we would also suggest to clients that the real focus of the survey is on the results provided which outline where the differences and similarities lie, from where action plans can be drawn and internal benchmarks used to monitor progress over subsequent survey processes. Bowles has found that by focusing on client scores ‘on an absolute basis... they all found that so valuable that they did not miss the one thing which some believe is a “must have” in this business…the external benchmark’. So, for rule 4, it is important to think about your need for benchmarking and what it is that you hope to achieve from this information being provided. Drill down on what it is that you require – an overall competitor score, scores for particular items and then consider what you would do with this additional knowledge, assuming it is based on the same item wording or the same employee engagement definition. It may be that as a result of a considered process that internal benchmarking is a more important goal and that external benchmarking norms, if required, are merely for curiosity purposes or not required at all. The key to this rule is be clear about what you want to receive at the end of the survey process in terms of data and be clear on what you want to achieve from this. Reference: http://davidbowles.wordpress.com/2010/03/08/troubling-issue-in-consultants-employee-engagement-trend-data-why-do-they-differ/

A movement within psychology is sweeping the profession and HR departments in organisations, that of positive psychology. It is suggested that we should pay at least equal attention to the strengths and potential within human behaviour rather than purely focusing on the problems that arise. Schaufeli (2002, 2006) found from his research into workplace stress that the polar opposite of this construct was employee engagement. The implication here is that if we can focus on driving employee engagement levels up then employee stress will be diminished and burnout avoided altogether; a positive approach helps to reduce the negative outcome of stress in employees. There are lots of tools and techniques out there that look specifically at reducing stress in the workplace – interventions aimed at three levels – primary, organisation based, secondary, individual based and tertiary, employee assistance programmes for example (see HSE). However, perhaps we should be rethinking the problem - to reduce stress what strategies can be used to increase engagement. Macey, Schneider, Barbera & Young, in a fairly recent study (2009) outlined a comprehensive approach to answering the question of ‘how can we increase engagement?’. They suggested that employee engagement is a consequence of four networked components: 1.    The capacity to engage2.    The motivation to engage3.    The freedom to engage4.    The focus on engagement strategy and goals of the organisation Macey et al (2009) suggest that having the capacity to engage means that the organisation provides employees with the information they need to do their job well, provides learning opportunities, timely feedback on performance and supports work-life balance. As a result of good job design employees will have the motivation to engage. The premise here is that jobs are intrinsically interesting (Hackman and Oldham, 1980) and as a result employees will feel valued, respected and supported at work. The freedom to engage leads to employees having autonomy over their roles and feel trusted enough to innovate and promote change to improve future operations. For this to occur, there has to be support from their managers and the wider organisation along with a feeling of security in their role to be able to be innovative. Finally, there needs to be an alignment between what employees do and the strategy, goals of the organisation. This can be encouraged by a culture/climate that communicates values and goals clearly. Employees will then know what the organisational priorities are and align with these goals. When these four networked components are in place employees are more likely to persist in tasks – we talk about ‘going the extra mile’ here. They will also respond more positively to challenges and changes. In addition, they will expand their own roles as they innovate and embrace subsequent changes and learning opportunities provided. So, in short, employee engagement is good not only for individual health as individuals can avoid stress cycles and ultimately burnout, but also good for organisational health as employers obtain more positive workplace behaviours from their employees. Therefore, the key conclusion from this is that ‘organisations should shift their emphasis from getting more out of people to investing more in them, so they are motivated – and able – to bring more of themselves to work every day’ (Schwartz & McCarthy, 2007 p64).