One Thing You Must Do to Invest in People & Culture in 2022
One Thing You Must Do to Invest in People & Culture in 2022
As we approach the end of the year, people leaders everywhere are determining how and where to invest their time and internal resources to build culture in a remote, hybrid, or return to work environment, to retain their best people, and to prioritize high-impact People Ops activities.
One of your best tools for doing that? Ask your people.
Send out an employee engagement survey in Q4 in order to gather meaningful feedback about what matters most to your team. Take the time to evaluate and analyze the data, and integrate key learnings into your People Ops goals and priorities for 2022.
What is Employee Engagement?
Employee engagement refers to the relationship between your people and the organization. In other words, how connected people feel to the org and how invested they are in their jobs. This is important to measure, because engaged employees drive the business forward. Research by Gallup shows that companies with engaged employees have 24-59% less turnover, 21% higher profitability, 17% better productivity and a 20% increase in sales. However, their research also shows that only 33% of Americans are actively engaged in their jobs.
The Benefits of Employee Engagement
Regularly measuring employee engagement, and uncovering what levers to pull in order to improve engagement, is crucial to company success. We could go on and on about the benefits, but here are just a few:
Predict Turnover and Retention: We’re currently in the midst of the great resignation in which employees are resigning in record numbers. If you know your engagement levels, you won’t be blindsided by turnover. Better yet, you’ll have the opportunity to re-engage employees before they decide to leave.
Give Employees a Voice: Surveying your employees on a regular basis makes them feel heard and valued. Just showing that you’re listening can really make a difference in the eyes of employees.
Take the Company’s Pulse: According to Lattice, “For people-first companies, employee engagement is the ultimate barometer of success.” Engagement not only predicts company performance, but it also gives you the best indicator of the health and success of your culture.
Provide Data for Strategic Planning: Sending out an engagement survey can enrich your strategic planning by leveraging your team’s diverse perspectives, uncovering blind spots, and bringing employees into the process.
What to Ask in an Engagement Survey
In order to get the most out of your engagement survey, it’s important to ask the right questions. Questions should be designed to get at the biggest factors that impact employee experience, from having the proper tools, training and support to having opportunities for growth and advancement to understanding how their performance and compensation is evaluated. For the best results, you should use questions that have been intentionally designed by experts and psychologists, in order to get reliable data in response.
It might feel overwhelming to know where to begin, and how to respond. Don’t worry, we’ve done the work for you! Download our free Engagement Survey Guide, which includes a survey template with 20 expertly designed questions, along with tips for administering the survey and interpreting your results.