Fishburn Hedges

21.06.2010

Employee engagement is about action, not just satisfaction

The staff survey is a much-used tool to provide internal comms and HR teams with a barometer to measure levels of employee satisfaction, motivation and engagement. It’s often only these hard stats – and how they benchmark against previous years – that get senior bosses to sit up and listen to potential employee problems.

Unfortunately, many organisations are still using surveys as a simple dipstick of satisfaction. If more than 60% of your staff are ‘satisfied’ with their job, that’ll do and let’s hope it stays that way next year, right?

Last week’s ORC International Conference on Employee Engagement confirmed otherwise. The conference focused on how to move beyond the results of the staff survey to create an ‘action plan’ to analyse the resulting core themes and out-takes, and actively address them. Some may be immediately solved, such as senior leadership visibility; others demand more buy-in, such as flexible working policies, staff award programmes or the development of regional and local scorecards for consistent evaluation. Either way, they need to be addressed or you’re en route to more dissatisfaction next year.

Thankfully, the message is getting through to companies like Warner Bros and Marks & Spencer that the most effective way to address staff concerns is to get the staff involved in the answers. This may be a series of focus groups, company-wide brainstorms, anonymous online forums or new staff responsibilities for delivering change. Not only does this help to find recommendations which employees are fully behind, it also harnesses any negative energy around the office and channels it towards solutions. The only pan-industry challenge seems to be getting senior execs behind the idea of ‘losing control’ to a bit of employee crowd-sourcing…

But as the Tarmac HR team say: it’s not just about turning up, but turning on. And that counts for senior management as well.

Posted by Nicola Conron