3 Steps to Improve Staff Engagement in Large Organizations

Employees who feel engaged, involved and valued provide for a strong workforce and a strong workforce is essential to achieve continuous improvement in delivering services.  It is in the benefit of the organisation that employees enjoy a positive employee experience.  By regularly reviewing the levels of satisfaction of employee satisfaction organisations are able to continually identify areas for improvement locally and across the wider organisation.

Improving Employee Experience

1. Build commitment by raising awareness of the staff engagement program
• The journey to employee engagement begins at team level.  For continuous improvement to be success all stakeholders need to understand why their commitment is crucial to the process.  Awareness leads to commitment and managers and directors will take more responsibility for introducing employee engagement in their areas. Make sure everyone involved understands what is expected from them and why employee engagement is important.
• Explain the outcomes and how employees will benefit from participating in the program. Make them believe that their opinion matters and these are the first steps to a better working environment.
2. Design and create an automated feedback process
• A simple automated process for managers to check their team details.
• Managers can remove and exclude team members if they are on holiday, off sick or absent during the process. This validation ensures the correct people are responding and increases response rates.
• Create automated dates and schedules for sending surveys, reminders and notifications.  Taking the hassle out of the process creates positivity and encourages participation.
3. Make sure results lead to action
• Automated reports aggregated to each level at scheduled dates at times
• Simple easy access to all results in one place relevant to each manager
• Feedback mechanism – discuss the results with your team and develop actions and targets
• Celebrate successes - recognise what you do well as a team and enjoy each win together.
• Develop team specific targets and actions to make a better working environment.
• Create visual storyboards to share with teams, highlighting the actions, targets and key areas of the report.
• Positive action makes for happy teams and encourages future participation.

Amy Bassi

Head of Customer Support & Projects

Webropol UK Ltd

101 of Successful Customer Experience Design

During the years as a research director in a market research agency I worked on a daily basis with measuring and developing the customer experience of different brands and companies. Participating in more than a hundred business development projects, I learnt that there are certain key components to successful customer experience design. In this blog I have gathered the top 5 factors to pay extra much attention to when designing customer experience. 

5 Tips for Designing Great Customer Experiences

1. Keep it simple. Firstly, make your service available and easy to buy with ready packages. Secondly, make it easy for the customer to get a successful customer experience. Remove all clutter and unneccessary choices and additions.
   
2. Measure. If you are working with your eyes closed, you don’t know whether you are moving in the right or wrong direction.
   
3. Give a little more than expected. Delight the customer with small unexpected surprises. Have a staff that is ready to go the extra mile to make the customer feel good.
4. Be authentic. Base your concept on a unique story, which is manifested in the details included in the customer experience. This will create a soul to your brand and lift up the customer experience to the next level.
5. Give good value for money. Develop efficient ways to produce what you are offering. Determine what is most important and relevant for your customers and focus on doing that more than well.

What is the best customer experience you have experienced? Comment below.

Annika Herrgård
Marketing Manager
Webropol

Step 3 & 4 of how to conduct a successful employee satisfaction survey

Step 3: Analysis and Reporting

• Analysis conducted properly will contribute to your action plan in a concrete and reliable manner. Make part indexes of the targeted question areas by creating a value of all questions that have measured the same area. Investigate which of these areas have the strongest impact on overall satisfaction at work. Also analyze the differences between departments within your organization.
•  Report Professionally. According to common HR research practice it is recommendable to exclude groups smaller than 5 persons from the report to ensure respondent integrity. You may want to export the research results as charts to PowerPoint. Plan a clear report structure and also include a summary, conclusion and identify further steps to be taken.
•  Organise meetings to present and discuss the results. Once you have the results it is beneficial to discuss the results internally at executive group level, organization wide level and team level so that you can begin creating action plans and implement improvement measures. 
•  Share the survey results and findings with the participants. Show the employees how important their opinion is. Discuss the action plans and improvement measures with them, get them involved. This will increase employee engagement and will make them feel involved in the improvements.

Step 4: Further Measures 

 

Repeat the survey every year. This will help you follow the process of development and determine the success of your action plan.

If you want to observe trends over time do not change the wording of questions. You may delete or add questions from year to year but do not change the word­ing of common questions since this may lead to misinter­pretation of the questions and incomparable data.

 
The contents of this blog post are taken from our guide 'Guide to conducting employee satisfaction surveys' which is written by our HR experts. The guide will be released on our website in the fall.

Isabelle Edouart Palm
Webropol Sweden

Step 2 of 4 to conducting a successful employee satisfaction survey

Step 2: Data Gathering

• Keep the employee database updated. Make a list of all the employees that will participate in the survey and make sure that their personal information is valid and updated. This is an important factor for the response rate and the integrity of the group results.
•  Think what will be better for your company: Conducting an anonymous or a named employee satisfaction survey?
• Communicate the approaching survey throughout the company. Our experience shows that companies who communicate with their employees in advance and explain the purpose of the survey and significance of their contribution (via Intranet, personal emails, announcements in meetings etc.), achieve significantly higher response rates.
• Develop a structured cover letter.

Be sure that you include information about

a)    how the survey should be answered

b)    how the results will be used

c)    the purpose and importance of the survey and

d)    how the respondent will benefit from completing the survey.

Also remember to mention the deadline for answering. Reminders can be sent out a week after the invitation.

The contents of this blog post are taken from our guide 'Guide to conducting employee satisfaction surveys' which is written by our HR experts. The guide will be released on our website in the fall.

Don't miss step 3 next week!

Isabelle Edouart Palm
Webropol Sweden

Step 1 of 4 to conducting a successful employee satisfaction survey

Conducting an employee satisfaction survey is a powerful tool, used by employers to establish how engaged their employees are in their work. It will identify which processes work well and realize which areas need to be improved. Employee satisfaction surveys also help you to measure the success of your development efforts.

This four-step guide will help you in your work to create an employee satisfaction survey. In this post we go through the first step whitch involves planning and design.

 

Step 1: Questionnaire Planning & Design

Start your employee satisfaction survey by establishing your requirements. 
- What information is important to you? 
- What do you expect to find out by conducting this survey? 
- What kind of analysis are you interested in? 
Answering these questions will help you to ask the right questions in the questionnaire.

Design an appropriate questionnaire. Remember to use clear and positive statements with comprehensive wording and only ask one question per item. Avoid using leading questions and consider providing a neutral choice and/or an ”open” answer alternative after a list of possible answers, where possible

By making the employee survey every year you have the opportunity to compare results from year to year. Then you can ensure that the measures you implement actually lead to improved results.

"All businesses and organizations need to conduct employee satisfaction surveys so that employers meet their employees' needs and expectations. The results of the survey creates a platform that will help the employer to focus and prioritize on the right things. By working actively with the result and set key word for example, employee satisfaction, leadership and work environment makes it easy to follow improvements from year to year."  Maria Wärnström, Human Resource Managers, Webropol Sweden

The contents of this blog post are taken from our guide 'Guide to conducting employee satisfaction surveys' which is written by our HR experts. The guide will be released on our website in the fall.

Stay tuned for step 2!

Isabelle Edouart Palm

Webropol Sweden