You’ve Conducted a Survey…Now What?

It’s a common practice to collect feedback from employees to gauge how things are going. Whether it is an employee opinion survey, an assessment of employee engagement, or a focus group/interview study, many organizations periodically ask employees for their thoughts and/or input. The hard part isn’t asking the questions or collecting the data. It’s what do you do once you have the information.

Next steps

Survey feedback often suggests that employees think that “management won’t do anything with the results.” To avoid this from happening, the senior leadership team should take the following steps after any assessment effort:

1. Review the survey results and analyze for key themes.

The senior leadership team should review the survey findings (individually and collectively) to identify key themes. When reviewing the data, think about why employees might be responding in that manner. Don’t assign blame, but rather look for information to learn from for benchmarking purposes. What did you do as an organization to accomplish those results? How could you continue to improve? Are there things you could replicate in other areas of the organization? Avoid rationalizing or defending responses, but ask “why” to better understand the findings.

2. Communicate results to managers.

Managers are the key to successful change and improvement efforts. They work directly with frontline supervisors and in some cases frontline staff (depending on organizational size). Communicate with managers regularly and hold them accountable for improvement efforts. It is the managers in most organizations where communication flows to the employee base on a day in day out basis. The senior leadership team should share information and then hold their respective managers accountable for the same process.

3. Communicate results to all employees.

Sharing results with employees is an important step in any employee survey process. Invite employees to ask questions about the data, raise issues or concerns, and share their thoughts and feelings regarding the survey process.

4. Prioritize issues; develop recommendations and response strategy.

The cascading process to the organization’s managers should not only include an expectation regarding communication, the senior leadership team should also set clear expectations for the management team about reviewing the results, prioritizing the key issues and developing a response strategy. The senior team should meet to discuss and prioritize company-wide issues and initiatives. They should meet individually with their respective management staff members to prioritize company-specific issues. Require your managers to develop action plans for the major issues that emerge from the data, including timelines and performance metrics. Provide one-on-one coaching and follow-up to ensure success.

5. Involve employees in developing and implementing solutions to the problems that surfaced.

Employees should be encouraged to provide additional input and to participate in improvement efforts undertaken as a result of the survey (where appropriate). Cross-functional teams are a great way to build commitment and buy-in to change and improvement efforts.

6. Communicate progress on survey-related initiatives.

Communicate to employees on a regular basis so they know that issues raised by the survey are being addressed. Take every opportunity to tell employees what you are doing, why and how it relates to the survey findings. Build good will with employees and regularly communicate progress on survey-related efforts.

7. Continue to revisit survey metrics to allow you to examine changes over time.

Use the information this year as your new benchmark and continue to examine your survey metrics over time to measure progress and evaluate results.

Diligent follow-up and regular communication will help ensure that you make the most of your survey process. Communicate often and tie improvement and change efforts to survey findings whenever possible.

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