Introduction
Listening to your employees starts with putting people first. The success, wellbeing, and happiness of our people are increasingly tied to the performance of an organisation. A healthy organisation adapts new skills and habits for listening to and acting on the voice of their people. It is all about how to redesign the way we measure employee engagement and turn it into tangible actions that create meaningful change.
Engagement Moment
Ensuring that employees are happy and successful at work isn't just a nice thing to do or a good theory alone; it's an essential part of successful people strategies. Research correlates higher employee engagement with better financial results, higher productivity, and better retention. Most importantly, employee engagement matters because people matter, and an organisation is only as successful as its people. To focus on researching what it's like to work in an organisation—and constantly improve on what one finds is an integral step to creating a truly people-centric organisation. Reimagine the ways to seek and measure employee engagement and turn engagement data into tangible actions that create meaningful change, and that starts with putting people first.
Evolution
Many companies did annual surveys between the 70s and 90s. Some called it as climate surveys, whereas some called it as engagement surveys, which were essentially used for benchmarking. The main purpose was to determine which part of business was not managed well. They would compare their surveys on yearly basis and measure metrics if their engagement scores improved, compared to the previous year. The challenge with these kinds of surveys was that the data about the workplace was a year old. It was buried in the HR department, where the line managers didn't even know what the data necessarily was, and it wasn't that actionable. Surveys have evolved from engagement to pulse, continuous surveys where feedback goes directly to the managers and is not filtered through HR. This process is a continuous response model of listening.
The journey to Success
New research has identified that relatively few employees consistently share their thoughts and opinions on issues outside the scope of their jobs with their managers. When employees voice the willingness to speak up to managers on several issues, improvement presents itself, which benefits both companies and their workers. Many companies have embraced more frequent surveying and more focused surveys, over the past year because of COVID, particularly shorter surveys because it was the only way to maintain a connection with employees and to hear them throughout this past year. Employee engagement has expanded beyond the survey process, and the Pandemic has changed the narrative of employee engagement to more than what data can tell us and what has shifted. It is imperative to embed a continuous feedback loop leveraging technology, framework, and good governance model.
About the Author
Dr. Parthiban Vijay Raghavan is an expert in solving an organization's complex problems through accurate diagnosis, designing, innovation, agility, and execution excellence. He is also expertise in Decision Making Process, Leadership Communication, OD, Learning Strategies, and implementation, He is a Certified OB/OD Professional.