Engagement Surveys: The Benefits and Drawbacks
Employee engagement makes a big difference in the workplace - a 2017 study by Gallup found that highly-engaged teams see a 41% reduction in absenteeism and a 17% increase in productivity. Engagement surveys are a great tool for getting a pulse on the state of employee engagement, including inclusion and belonging. While surveys can be an effective tool for gathering data and sentiment, they still remain biased - they can only collect what people elect to tell you.
In order to truly influence inclusion and belonging, you need a pulse on how people engage with DEI topics at work, and how their engagement with these topics impacts inclusion and belonging for themselves and for their colleagues. In this article, we look at the benefits and challenges posed by engagement surveys, and how some of the world’s top companies use Crescendo to address these challenges.
The benefits and drawbacks of surveys
Engagement surveys help to identify areas for improvement in various aspects of business by providing key insights around the workforce. Here are some of their benefits:
+ Give employees an opportunity to voice what matters to them.
Engagement surveys are unique in that they give employees an opportunity to voice their individual perspectives. By allowing them to express feedback and key insights on what impacts their overall engagement in the workplace, you can get a sense of what drives employees and their investment with your organizational goals. In addition, providing a platform to voice opinions helps build trust between leaders and employees by reinforcing two-way communication.
+ Identify gaps and areas for improvement in workplace culture.
By deriving personal insights from employee feedback, leaders can identify both specific and broad areas for improvement within an organization’s state of inclusion and workplace culture. These insights are valuable because they give you an inward focus that centers on the people that drive your organization’s day-to-day functioning - your employees!
+ Use data to strengthen employee morale, retention, productivity and more.
Data from engagement surveys can amplify current strategies or plans to enhance employee engagement. Key factors such as employee retention, absenteeism, productivity, psychological safety and morale can be tracked over time. HR professionals can especially use this data to set benchmarks to gauge progress as initiatives are implemented.
Engagement surveys have the potential to provide great insights into what makes your workplace work. But how useful are the data and insights they glean?
These are some of the ways in which surveys can fall short when it comes to tracking engagement:
- Surveys only give you what people are reporting, not what they are actually doing.
There will always be a delta between what someone does and what they say they did. Surveys can pose challenges in obtaining data that accurately reflects your organization because of bias. Fear of a lack of confidentiality or repercussions for responses can prevent employees from providing honest feedback. Many surveys ask employees for their job titles and department name, which makes it difficult to assume anonymity.
Measuring your team’s psychological safety, which describes how willing they are to take risks, ask for help and make mistakes in the workplace without fear of punishment, can help you understand the likelihood of honest responses. Read more about psychological safety and signs that your workplace needs improvement, here.
- The factors you track or questions you ask may not give you the insights you need.
Determining which questions to ask in your engagement survey to gain information that effectively represents employee engagement within your organization can be challenging. If questions are too specific, they may not be able to provide information that is relevant to your survey objectives. Broad questions may not create enough opportunity to uncover real issues that are relevant to employees.
- There’s a lack of tools available to effectively synthesize engagement data and use it to improve.
Getting survey data is one thing. Using it to actually enhance employee engagement is another. In a survey by Leadership IQ - “How good is your employee engagement survey?” only 22% of HR executives answered that their engagement survey scores were low but saw dramatic improvement OR were already high and were able to stay high.
There are many ways to measure employee engagement, but how can you use that data to improve engagement?
The solution:
Combining microlearning and people analytics to naturally embed DEI themes into the day-to-day workflow, and measure the resulting impact on inclusion and belonging.
Crescendo fills the gaps in the ability to measure engagement with data in real-time, that reflects the changing state of inclusion and belonging within your organization as your employees engage in DEI learning.
Through Crescendo Moments, employees receive regular content on customized DEI topics, and engage in microlearning that is well-integrated with the daily flow of work. Crescendo Copilot - Crescendo’s analytics platform, lets leaders track how employees learn and engage with this content and how that impacts inclusion organization-wide.
“When it comes to moving the needle on inclusion and belonging, it’s important to look at what people are doing, not just what they are willing to say. When you combine self-reported data with behavioural data, you can get a complete picture, and from there target specific outcomes.”
With Crescendo Moments and Crescendo Copilot, you can deploy personalized DEI content at a global scale, and then track inclusive action as it spreads through your workforce. Connect with us to learn how Crescendo tracks the spread inclusive action organization-wide!
