Engagement drives culture. Here’s how to measure it.
Culture builds on itself through engaged employees, and that culture, in turn, helps employees stay engaged.
Culture is the summation of all the thousands of interactions, norms, and behaviors at a company. But you can’t just hire good people and expect the Best Places to Work awards to start piling up.
Leaders have to foster and maintain company culture or it can go downhill fast. Culture builds on itself through engaged employees, and that culture, in turn, helps employees stay engaged. Engagement surveys are a powerful tool for ensuring employees stay plugged into your culture and satisfied with their day-to-day experience.
Related: Sales & marketing tips for 2021: Communication & engagement
The problem is that companies can easily fumble asking for employee feedback. Surveys might not happen frequently enough to gauge real-time sentiment. Poorly written questions can come off as scattered or ambiguous, leading to lower participation. Surveys like these don’t just skew leaders’ perception of the state of play, they can undermine employees’ trust in your business, especially if you can’t deliver on their feedback.
Identifying your challenges
Effective engagement surveys have focus. Before writing any questions down, identify your workplace’s top challenges. Company leaders should consult with managers to get a sense of what they’re seeing among reports. Are teams not communicating? Are employees burned out? Rather than try to find solutions for every conceivable problem, narrow down your list by answering these questions:
- Is this a problem you can solve in a reasonable time frame?
- How often does the problem occur?
- How costly or problematic is the issue?
- What is the main benefit of solving the problem?
- Does the company have the resources to solve the problem?
The first and last questions might be the most important ones to ask. If you can’t commit to acting on the employee feedback you get around an issue, don’t ask about it. You shouldn’t expect employees to participate in future surveys if you have a track record of not delivering results.
Writing your survey
Once you’ve identified opportunities for improvement, it’s time to narrow down your survey questions. The most effective questions are unambiguous, worded neutrally, and ask one thing at a time. Lattice and our partners conducted research in this area, singling out pointed questions on topics like self-efficacy, belonging, work relationships, and trust in management. We detail these in People Strategy, but I’ve listed a few below as examples. Keep in mind that these are rated on a Likert scale (strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, and strongly agree) to gauge how intensely employees feel.
- I plan to still be at this company in two years.
- I can list concrete steps I need to take to move up in my organization within the year.
- I feel exhausted in the morning at the thought of another day at work.
- Members of this team can bring up problems and tough issues.
We know one of the hardest parts about surveying is picking (and agreeing on) the questions. It’s also where survey initiatives can flame out, which is why we intentionally included prebuilt survey templates in Lattice. We encourage companies to settle on 25-50 questions for their surveys, ideally on the lower end of that range. While most of our questions are rated on a Likert scale, giving employees the option to leave additional written comments can give you deeper insight.
Analyzing the results
Once you’ve conducted your survey and the results are in, it’s time to develop an action plan. To take that step, you’ll need more than a birds-eye view of the data first.
Company-wide survey results can tell you about larger dips in engagement, but the most telling insights usually come from looking at cross-sections. In other words, are specific departments or teams struggling more than others? How about women or working parents? By considering discrepancies here — and reading all your survey comments — you can deduce what solutions might look like.
For example, if certain demographics report feeling disengaged or excluded from company culture, that might call for new diversity and inclusion goals. Conversely, maybe one department is significantly more engaged than everyone else. As you set next steps, you’ll want to look at what that team is doing differently and replicate it.
Taking action
Once you have your data story, you can take those insights, recommend how to act, get buy-in, and put a plan in place. Goal setting is a valuable tool here. Use the classic “SMART” criteria — all of your engagement survey follow-up goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timebound.
Let’s go through an example. With employees working from home due to the pandemic, your surveys may show that employees feel disconnected from each other. The circumstances that brought you might have been out of your control, but there are clear measures that you can take to help employees feel more included. Maybe you start holding company-sponsored happy hours or other team bonding initiatives over teleconference each month. These are small fixes, but ones that could go a long way toward fostering the kind of camaraderie some newly remote employees might be missing.
Fortunately, you don’t have to wait until your next big survey to track progress. Pulse surveys, or short, 1-5 question surveys, can provide you with data in real-time. These quick checkups give you immediate insights into engagement and allow employers to gauge their action plans’ impact and quickly course-correct. Every few months, share your progress at a company-wide all-hands to demonstrate your commitment to improving the status quo.
Engagement and culture go hand in hand — tracking and improving the former will ultimately strengthen the latter. By repeating this process repeatedly, you can ensure the vitality of your company culture in good times and bad.
Jack Altman is co-founder and chief executive officer at Lattice.
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