Organisational surveys may have become highly sophisticated, but subsequently making meaningful changes still requires executive support. Craig Donaldson examines what HR needs to do for an organisation to properly benefit from workforce diagnostics
Organisational surveys may have become highly sophisticated, but subsequently making meaningful changes still requires executive support. Craig Donaldson examines what HR needs to do for an organisation to properly benefit from workforce diagnostics
Employee surveys have become an increasingly popular tool with large companies in the past few years. From the basic employee opinion surveys through to more sophisticated cultural and organisational surveys, such tools are growing in complexity as well as in the kind of data they make available.
Most organisations now recognise that traditional employee surveys have no positive impact on organisational performance, according to Andrew Beveridge, business manager at Hay Group. “For years most employee surveys focused on employee satisfaction and basically involved dumping a lot of data on companies without any business context or recommendations for action. It turns out that satisfied employees can produce poor results, and dissatisfied employees can actually prove to be reasonably productive in the short- to medium-term. Employee satisfaction simply isn’t the right measure,” he says.
The traditional employee survey’s lack of impact has lead to a greater focus on employee engagement, says Beveridge, along with the ability of an organisation’s leaders to increase the discretionary effort of employees.
As such, there is a move towards a more integrated view of employee and organisational surveys, according to Brigit Douglas-Raper, project manager, Hewitt Best Employers. “Not only are organisations measuring employee engagement, they are now starting to integrate engagement surveys with organisational culture or values surveys,” she says. “Organisations are seeking to better understand how their culture and their people interact and how the organisation can effectively leverage these components to deliver on the strategic objectives of the organisation.”
Steve Ewin, vice president for Gallup, says culture varies within an organisation more widely than across organisations, and thus the single biggest development is that companies now realise that engagement must be measured at the work group level. “Individual teams are now taking responsibility for improving their own engagement levels. Engagement surveys are linked to key business outcomes and now have a high degree of focus from CEOs and executive teams,” he says.
Douglas-Raper also notes a trend towards understanding what engages executives. Research indicates that a key challenge for many executive teams is moving from a “team of leaders” towards a more cohesive and collaborative “leadership team”. Understanding what drives executive engagement helps to build a stronger and higher performing team, she says.
Surveying the challenges
While HR plays an instrumental role in the survey process, the degree to which organisational change is successful is the responsibility of an organisation’s leaders. The CEO and executive team’s commitment are key to taking action on survey results and driving change.
“Initially, senior leaders may be resistant to investing in understanding what engages their employees and uncovering some of the deeper issues affecting the performance of the organisation and its people,”Douglas-Raper has found.
“Following the announcement of results, we often see HR professionals struggling to attract the commitment of senior leaders to acting on the engagement results and taking personal accountability for achieving long-term increases in employee engagement. Without senior leaders acting as champions of the change process, organisations are unable to sustain momentum and often find their engagement levels plateau over time.”
Beveridge also believes that gaining ownership of the survey and its results by the CEO and senior executives is the single biggest challenge and determinant of a survey’s ability to lead to enhanced business performance. “Once you have this ownership, everything else – communication, commitment to action, organisational change – becomes much simpler. Without CEO and senior executive commitment, you’d be better off not running the survey.” If HR is a true business partner, the function should be able to gain this level of ownership and commitment, she adds.
Ewin says it is important to ensure the process of securing executive support is not rushed. “The other critical component concerns the rollout of results,”he says. “HR must ensure that all managers receive training on engagement. If not, then it is unlikely that engagement levels will improve.”
Dealing with ‘the too hard basket’
While many executive teams can be happy enough to support the initial rollout of a survey, this enthusiasm can sometimes quickly wane when less than positive results come back. In such cases, results are often swept under the carpet as executives prefer to focus on issues that involve less personal and organisational change.
Such organisations will often be selective in their communication to employees, choosing to communicate the good news but avoiding openly addressing the organisation’s key challenges, Douglas-Raper says. “Upon hearing their survey results, executives typically go through a cycle of awareness, acceptance and then action. The risk of executives failing to accept and acknowledge employees’ negative feedback is that many of the fundamental organisational issues are not effectively addressed, leaving employees feeling unheard and posing a significant threat to engagement levels within that organisation.”
Beveridge has found it is pretty rare for executives to sweep results under the carpet if they own the survey and understand their role in driving change. “Running an employee survey brings with it an implied commitment to action,” he says. “If you ask employees about pay, you’d better be prepared to do something about it. Once most executives understand this principle, they know what they’re in for and the opportunities a survey can bring.”
Dealing with executive and line resistance
The ability to influence executives and line managers is an increasingly important skill for HR professionals. When it comes to organisational surveys and cultural change, the ability to influence becomes critical as change often becomes personal for leaders.
“Countering resistance to change is an example of when a HR professional needs to put on their leadership and marketing hats,” says Beveridge. “They need to clearly define a business case for change combined with ‘what’s in it for me’ from the perspective of managers and employees. HR professionals can benefit greatly from learning how to become better leaders, and how to embrace their internal marketing role.”
The most effective HR professionals are also great leaders, according to Beveridge, and know exactly how to frame communications in a way that inspires action. The alternative is to shun the leadership role and act as the company “police”–“detecting and punishing the failure to adhere to company HR procedures. Not only is this a boring role, it also removes any ability of HR to have a meaningful impact on an organisation”, he says.
If HR professionals come up against executives and line managers who are resistant to change, Douglas-Raper says this should come back to building a strong business case for increasing employee engagement. Research from Hewitt has found organisations with workforce engagement levels of more than 60 per cent have a higher level of financial performance, while financial performance is eroded in organisations with workforce engagement levels of less than 40 per cent. Gallup research has also found that workgroups in the top quartile of its database are 18 per cent more productive and 12 per cent more profitable, and have 62 per cent fewer safety incidents and 27 per cent less absenteeism than those companies in the bottom quartile. “Once executives and line managers start to associate engaged employees with improved financial performance, they are more likely to regard employee engagement as a key performance indicator within the business,” Douglas-Raper says.
Additionally, it is important for line managers and leaders within the organisation to be held accountable for engaging their people. She adds that HR professionals can drive accountability for change by integrating key behaviours required to increase engagement with individual managers’performance measures.
Building the business case
In order to build the foundations for organisational diagnostics – and successful change as a result – HR can glean some insights from those at the top. “Seek some expert advice from people who are used to building business cases and understand the principles behind ROI within your organisation. Most often this will be the CFO and other senior executives,” Beveridge says. External support from a consultancy that has been in the survey and culture change business for an extended period of time also helps, he adds.
HR professionals need to link engagement to measures that are important in the business and continue to measure engagement over time to assess impact, Douglas-Raper says. “It is not simply the act of measuring engagement that creates a return on investment. The investment an organisation makes in measuring employee engagement will only be returned if the organisation then focuses on planning, prioritising and executing actions.”
There is a correlation between action planning and execution and increased engagement scores, she says. For example, a large multinational measured not only engagement, but implementation of actions across the business. It found that where the percentage of actions implemented score increased from one survey cycle to the next, so too did engagement.
