Far too often, company policies are crafted at the top and handed down from the top, with no consideration of the people who will be required to work for them. Meanwhile, who is in a better position to tell you what will work and why, than the people doing the job?
Understanding how your people feel about their work and taking steps to ensure their needs are addressed is of the utmost importance to your organization’s potential for success.
And, that just begins to scratch the surface of the importance of employee insights.
What Are Employee Insights?
If more companies put the same effort into understanding their employees that they put into understanding their customers they’d be far better off. A positive employee experience is just as important as a positive customer experience. In fact, employee satisfaction is absolutely vital to the profitability of your company.
An employee insight verbalizes what a worker perceives and observes about the workplace over the course of doing their jobs. These experiences can have a direct impact on your ability to hire, motivate and retain. And, just as it is more cost effective to hold on to an existing customer than get a new one, it is far less expensive to hold on to an existing employee than it is to seek, vet, hire and train a new one.
Meanwhile, along with the rise of social media has come the ability for people to share the nature of their work experiences. If word gets around that your company is a lousy place at which to work, in addition to struggling to hold on to people, you’re going to have trouble attracting top talent in the first place.
Gathering Employee Insights
The best way to find out how people feel about something is to ask them. However, they must be asked in a way that assures them their opinions are valued and more importantly — won’t result in some sort of negative backlash. In other words, you must make sure people feel safe telling you what they really think.
In most cases, insight gathering is conducted by way of annual surveys. These can be useful, particularly when cloaked in anonymity. However, this form of employee engagement must be crafted in such a way as to provide opportunities to expound upon the questions.
To that end, open-ended questions tend to glean more actionable data than do numerical surveys, in which people are asked to rate something on a numerical scale. These do not provide respondents with an opportunity to express nuanced opinions, which are absolutely critical to gaining useful employee insights.
Survey Types
In most cases, the more narrowly focused the survey, the higher quality data you’ll get. With that in mind, there are four basic types of employee surveys:
Engagement surveys are designed to gather information about how your employees feel about their jobs — and why they feel the way they do.
Experience surveys provide an opportunity for employees to express their overall satisfaction and motivation levels.
Effectiveness surveys provide an opportunity for employees to express their opinions about the performances of their peers.
Pulse surveys, short, quick, and conducted more frequently, can serve as bellwethers between annual surveys of the types listed above.
You Must Go Beyond Surveys
Equally as important as establishing the safety of your respondents is taking action based upon the employee insights provided. If people call attention to something, they expect some sort of change to come from their effort.
Morale suffers when employees are continually surveyed and things stay the same. Eventually, you will no longer get truthful responses, apathy will set in and attrition will begin to occur.
Again, the whole point of gaining employee insights is to ensure that your team feels valued, supported, and appreciated. Ignoring survey results will have the exact opposite effect. Share the results of the survey with the respondents. Tell them what actions will be taken as a result of what the survey’s revelations.
Then — take those actions.
