I recently caught up with Beekeeper’s Corey McCarthy to discuss employee engagement and culture; both topics that continue to be a focus area for businesses across all industries. With the percentage of ‘engaged’ workers in the U.S., (those who are involved in, enthusiastic about and committed to their work and workplace) being reported at 34% by Gallup, there are many tools making their way into the market to help organizations increase this number, from people analytics to feedback apps.
I was interested in the results Beekeeper shared from a recent poll they conducted of over 1,000 employees across the US, Mexico, Europe, and Canada, looking at the presence and impact of mobile communication tools. The range of industries that respondents worked in included agriculture, construction, healthcare, hotel and food services, manufacturing, retail, transportation and warehousing, as well as utilities, and surveyed roles across all levels. Given that technology was one of the 14 factors found from extensively researching the attributes of high performance, highly engaged cultures, I was interested to see how employees felt.
Employee surveys as a feedback mechanism
The number of surveys respondents reported their company carried out was 11 per year on average. At nearly one a month, you would hope that the information gathered was seeing a continuous improvement on employee engagement and experience. Alas, “organizations are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on employee engagement programs, yet their scores on engagement surveys remain abysmally low”. Sadly, this is often due to the fact that the data they gather is not rapidly actionable or some reactive plan is implemented to address the low score that may cause a temporary distraction from the real issues or a slight momentary increase in satisfaction.
Strategies for creating effective employee surveys
While surveys can certainly provide insights, there are many considerations when creating an effective strategy to gather employee feedback and insights. What you ask, how you ask, and when you ask will all depend on the reasons––and what you hope to achieve as a result of gaining their insights––behind why you are asking your questions in the first place. Defining what you hope to understand and what decision you can make or action you can take when you have the data gathered will help you better craft your feedback methodology. There will be times when a longer survey and feedback program is needed. In other cases, there may be times when a quick pulse survey is needed, or there may be data sources you can gather that can help answer your questions without even sending a survey. It pays to be purposeful in your strategy so that your metrics and measures are worth the time and effort all around.
Make opportunities for sharing feedback available to employees 24/7
While surveys are one vehicle for employees to share their thoughts and ideas, based on your timeframe, it is equally important to provide opportunities for employees to share feedback whenever they feel the need to provide it. There should be flexible mechanisms available for them to provide their thoughts outside of your survey requests when they need to. While having a communication tool is useful, a transparent, trusting culture also needs to be present so employees feel comfortable being open and honest without fears of negative repercussions. If your organization struggles with this, it can be helpful to provide a truly anonymous way for employees to let you know how they feel.
Additionally, surveys should not be a replacement for human interactions. While the data gathered can help inform follow on discussions and actions, managers need to make sure that spending time understanding their employees needs, development goals, and perspectives is a part of their normal way of working, and not a siloed task or “checkbox” item on their to-do list.
Understanding and committing to multifaceted employee engagement
Just over half of the people polled said their company had a mobile communication platform for employees to use, and nearly three quarters said they use their personal mobile devices to communicate with their co-workers.
While the majority of respondents found it easy to reach their managers when they needed them, feeling that their company celebrated their achievements, and kept them informed with what was happening at their company did not fare quite as well. This is important as these are two key areas of employee engagement. Corey McCarthy echoes this idea, explaining that the future of successful employee engagement depends on the simplification, unification, and integration of your organization’s communication strategy. “The bottom line? When employees are successfully informed, engaged, and recognized, they are more satisfied and will perform better.”
Develop different ways to foster and reward employee engagement
Given that studies have shown when people are not acknowledged they can lose motivation, it is critical to foster a culture where your workforce’s contributions and wins are recognized. This recognition should not be superficial kudos, but meaningful and specific acknowledgement of genuine achievements – at the individual, team, and organizational level.
Flexibility in how people are recognized is key as different things will motivate different people. Having a range of short and long-term rewards, as well as different ways to recognize people within context, can be helpful. For example, depending on the achievement and the person being recognized, it might be more appropriate to let someone know you have noticed their accomplishments privately, versus sharing this recognition in a public announcement. It has also been demonstrated that employees place high value on respect. While there is a general level of professional respect that is to be expected, there is also earned respect which recognizes individual employees who display valued qualities or behaviors. Acknowledgement is a key part of demonstrating this earned respect, and therefore helps employees feel valued.
Cultivating a culture of transparency breeds engaged and motivated workers
Looking at the importance of communications and keeping employees informed, studies have shown the positive role transparency can play in maintaining an engaged, motivated workforce. Sadly, many of us have likely experienced workplace scenarios in which we have to wait for the decisions made to filter down the management chain (typically with the message being changed along the way), or sometimes not being communicated at all. Often times, this is because of a lack of alignment: the left hand of an organization has no idea what the right hand is doing, let alone what the head may be saying. This is central, notes McCarthy, to adequately engaging and managing today’s workforces: “Empowering your entire team with real-time mobile collaboration and communication tools facilitates organizational and workforce goal alignment. Proactively connecting your workforce with a digital communication demonstrates intentional investment in the quality of their jobs, and that leadership is paying attention. Importantly, this also avoids your workforce having to find ways to communicate to get the information they need that might not be secure or manageable.”
Creating a culture of transparency has several benefits, including:
- Enabling employees to develop a deeper level of trust between themselves and their coworkers, between themselves and leadership, and between themselves and the company as a whole.
- Trust opens the door for greater levels of creativity and higher levels of productivity. After all, no one wants to share their thoughts when they don’t trust who they are talking to, and no one wants to give their best to an organization that doesn’t value or respect them.
From the poll responses of those at companies with and without mobile communication tools, people at companies with a communication and productivity platform in place tend to feel more positively about how well their company celebrates their achievements, and feel more well-informed. This is not surprising as digital communication tools can provide an instrument to easily, safely, and quickly share acknowledgments of achievements, and facilitate two-way communication. While this is certainly a positive, just like employee feedback, it is worth remembering that these tools should help foster and enrich the cultural values, rather than a complete replacement for human touch points in the workplace.
“When employees are successfully informed, engaged, and recognized, they are more satisfied and will perform better”
The path to better employee engagement
In summary, when looking at the tools and technologies you are using to better engage your workforce, it is important to keep the following guidelines in mind:
- Start with purpose. What culture are you trying to nurture? What behaviors are you trying to encourage?
- Understand your employees. What do they need? How do they work? How can you support them through creating an ideal environment for them to thrive in so they can perform their jobs with optimal success?
- Design with security in mind. With data privacy regulations becoming increasingly more strict be sure to think about security from the start. How does the technology keep your employee data safe?
- Understand what data you actually would like to see and why. What could you do and what decisions could you make if you had which data points?
- Be clear on how the tool supports communication and collaboration. How does it mesh with human interactions? Does the technology encourage or hinder productivity and innovation? What does the tool make easier, faster, or better? Will it be time-consuming to integrate and implement with your employee base and environment?
- Make the tool a part of the employee experience, not something used separately. Think about all of the employee touch points and the moments in between them to best understand how the digital and physical moments interact to create an engaging experience.
When answering the above questions, be sure to stay specific. If you struggle to be specific, then you may well need to spend a little more time thinking about your strategy. Digital tools can support the creation and growth of high-performance, highly-engaged cultures, but they work best when the strategy is created using a human lens, and then assessed by the role they play in achieving your organizational goals––not just adopting technology for technology’s sake.