Insight On: An Employee Engagement Survey

This continues our series on Employee Engagement by Jenna Reed.

Now that you’ve decided to conduct an Employee Engagement Survey, here are a few things to consider:

1. Committing to conducting a survey requires committing to act upon the results.  Soliciting the opinions of employees and failing to respond inevitably has negative results for organizations and erodes trust and credibility.  You can guess what the result will be if you conduct the survey again.
2. Use an outside party to administer the survey.  This builds employee confidence in the survey truly being anonymous and also results in more honest employee responses.  With Cascade’s survey you also get benchmark comparisons with other organizations who have conducted its survey.
3. Plan it for a relatively calm time of year.  For example, if you’re an accounting firm, don’t conduct this type of survey in April during the height of tax season. 
4. Don’t conduct a survey during a union campaign.  While it seems like a good time to solicit employee opinions, it may be an unfair labor practice.  Wait until after the campaign.  Better yet, do it before there is ever a hint of a campaign.  Once you’re armed with that information, taking appropriate action may avoid the need for a campaign.
5. Communicate with employees in advance about the engagement survey including why you’re doing it, what they should expect when they take the survey and what to expect when it’s done.

Jenna