A lackadaisical approach to employee engagement may be worse than doing nothing
I was looking over The State of Employee Engagement 2014 report from RoundPegg, the culture management and employee engagement platform, and discovered some discouraging numbers. In particular, these findings are like walking into a plate glass door:
- 3 out of 5 companies are missing the opportunity to drive employee engagement
- Only 27% of companies said their engagement recommendations were effective
- 82% of companies think their workforce doesn’t feel their engagement efforts are effective.
And why are these efforts ineffective? Infrequently administered and long delay after surveys.
41% of companies conduct annual engagement surveys, 18% do so every two years. Years! Only 20% conduct surveys more than once a year.
I completely agree with RoundPegg’s take on the frequency element:
Many companies assume that infrequent engagement surveys are better than no engagement surveys. This, however, is a fallacy. When an organization measures infrequently and does not take meaningful action with its data, employees get the impression that management is not listening at all.
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To get a proper grasp on employee engagement levels in your organization, RoundPegg suggests measuring engagement via an engagement survey at least quarterly (if not more frequently), and complimenting your engagement surveys with “pulse” surveys to follow up on specific issues that the primary engagement survey unearths.
This chart shows that the shelf life of survey information drops very quickly, with effectiveness halved if results are three months old before actions are taken.
The Bottom Line
Companies wanting to increase employee engagement have to do more than giving it lip service. A regime of frequent surveys and active response to what the surveys reveal is a necessary foundation for increasing employee engagement. While it is only the first step to turning around the disengagement of the workforce, it is essential to everything that follows. And a lackadaisical approach is likely to just increase employee disengagement, because it will appear as if management isn’t listening.
