Employee Survey Starter Toolkit
According to a new survey by AXELOS, finding and retaining top talent is the number-one challenge facing recruiters today. If you’re a fast-growing organization, you are more likely to face this challenge. Maintaining organization culture as a competitive advantage is tough. Leadership needs to understand the health of their company culture and how talent perceives the organization.
Once organizations find a highly-skilled, valuable employee, they want to keep them — especially today, when top talent has endless options for where to pitch their tent and make a professional home. With that in mind, the demand for diagnosing how your talent is doing from once in two years to almost real-time is rising. With that new attention, there’s a corresponding interest in learning about the organization’s health. It’s an incredible topic in building organizational insights for HR partners and I can assure you there are easy on-ramp options and ways to bring an evidence-based daily life in HR.
I’ve put together “Employee Survey Starter Kit”. It has resources that helped me from design to the action phase of pulse surveys. If you have a limited amount of time to get up to speed, you should be in pretty good shape after reading through these articles.
I hope you enjoy the repository below. Do share your favorite resources/articles/books that are not part of the list and I’ll add them to the kit.
Articles
Why is the employee survey required?
This HBR article focuses on why employee surveys are still one of the best ways to measure engagement. It deep dives into internal research at Facebook about the evidence-based HR practice of diagnosing organization health through multi-channels and surveys as one of them to gauge.
What do stats reveal for organizations not bothering about it?
This study by leadershipIQ focuses on the risks of ignoring employee feedback and its chilling effect on employee engagement.
Is your company ready for the survey?
This is incredibly handy for early-stage startups or organizations treading the path of building great people practices. Conducting an employee survey without proper follow-up after the survey can be worse than never doing the survey in the first place. When you ask employees for their opinions, you set the expectation that you will listen to and take action on the results.
Before initiating your employee engagement survey, review the following questions to determine whether you are prepared to confront the things that may be necessary after the survey is complete.
This article has a good collection of the various tools out there in the market and how it can be leveraged in your business context depending on the stage of the business.
Usually, a great place to work framework can be overwhelming in the first place depending upon the stage of the company. Interviews with business leaders and FGD’s across segments of employees will pivot to the themes & questions that are relevant in the context. Determining the appropriate measuring scale will be crucial to gain alignment with leadership at this stage.
Implementation & Communication plan
This guide will allow you to navigate step by step on the overall implementation considerations & communication plan right from the design to the action stage.
Podcasts
These collections are where I go to stay up to date on the field. There are many more out there (please post about them in the comments!), but here are a few that I’d recommend to people getting started in this space.
With growth comes noise. How often should I survey my workforce? Is it time to ditch the annual survey? What about survey fatigue? How do I combine surveys with other data and analytics? These are just some of the areas covered by David & his guest Sarah Johnson on the podcast, Vice President of Enterprise Surveys and Workforce Analytics at Perceptyx.
One of the trickiest parts about these surveys is asking the right questions. There is a whole field of psychology that goes into making sure the questions are asked in such a way as to elicit the most honest answer from the respondent while minimizing participation bias.
And thank you reader for making it to the end! Please stay in touch and add comments, resources, and questions in the comments. I’m also free to catch up for coffee or a phone call anytime to talk about this topic. I look forward to hearing from you.
