Imagine it’s January and you are getting ready to launch your flagship annual employee experience survey. You spent the last year getting a new learning and development (L&D) program off the ground, making updates to your flexible working policy, and doing some fine-tuning to the employee recognition program. You can hardly believe how much you managed to deliver. It was certainly a lot of work, but you know it was worth it. Well, at least you’re hoping that it was worth it, because now is the time for data to say if the initiatives had their intended impact.
A great way to know whether your initiatives had their desired impact is to ask those same questions whose scores drove you to launch the initiatives in the first place and see if their results changed over time. At QuestionPro Workforce we just revamped and re-launched our trend widget. After a couple of decades working closely with clients, helping them build their employee listening programs, we continued to learn more about what could help them make the most of their time and resources when it comes to making sure they have the best employee experience. This is how we would recommend that you check in on your results.
On top of asking the questions that gave fuel to the changes, you can also add some more questions, especially open ended questions, to get even better insights on why something worked, or why it didn’t to help you continue to make improvements. But remember that asking the same question over time will be the best way to start to understand the direct impact of your company’s actions.
Depending on the size and structure of your company, it’s more than likely that employees across the board had somewhat different experiences. Perhaps the training program really resonated with the employees in the US, but fell short for employees in Mexico.
You could also see that L&D really took off for sales, but it seems as if the engineering team didn’t get the content they were quite looking for.
Being able to see these kinds of differences helps you to continue to iterate and improve on your programs. It’s highly unlikely that any single program will be flawless and without opportunities to be improved from the get go. These kinds of analyses can be extremely helpful in showing you where to put your effort next.
If at the launch you measured change year over year (YoY), in the next cycle, as you fine tune your program, you can introduce pulse surveys, and get more real-time feedback on the changes you can make so you don’t have to get the whole year pass by not knowing how well your program is resonating with the employees.
In pulse surveys you can identify the segments of employees where you perhaps saw the lowest amount of improvement, or perhaps even a YoY decline. Target specific survey questions to that population only, to make sure you are getting the most valuable data and making targeted changes to have the best chance of improving the scores.
Remember that real, sustainable change takes time. Survey data can be extremely useful in helping you identify where to put in the greatest effort, where you have the biggest opportunity to improve employee experience. But like any significant changes in life, it will take trial and sometimes error, experimenting and iterating on ideas to keep improving over time. And really the process never ends, because the world around us changes and the employees’ needs change over time too. This is why it is so critical to have an ongoing conversation with employees, and measure and adjust progress over time, because it will give you the greatest chance at success.
Log in to your QuestionPro Workforce account to check out the new Trend Widget today!
Not a client yet and would like to see how QuestionPro Workforce analytics work? Let us know, we’d love to show you!
