Next week is kind of a big deal for me and my organisation. Our full year engagement survey is out (eeeek!). It genuinely feels like I’m waiting for my exam results.
So to stop me nervously pacing, and checking my emails every 30seconds I thought I’d take this opportunity and wade into discussions around engagement. It’s a subject that most IC people have an opinion on and recently there have also been debates on who owns it in an organisation. Does it sit with IC or HR or neither?
Currently at my org it sits with IC but with very heavy support from HR. I’m not saying that this is the perfect model but it does work for us. However, it was becoming quite apparent that we needed to make a few changes in the way we handled this process this time round. So we looked at three key areas:
1) Training – We needed our managers to truly understand what engagement and empowerment meant for our organisation. We needed them to have confidence in the process and feel comfortable when they speak to their teams rather than relying on HR or IC. In these training sessions they had the opportunity to hear from an independent engagement specialist who gave them insight on how it works at our organisation, what it means for their teams and how they can make a difference. This session did give them some clarity and throughout the year we will continue with ad-hoc training with various specialists focusing on key areas.
2) Accessible information – we wanted our leaders to have an easy to use tool that was available to them 24/7 no matter where they were in the world. So we created an online portal which contains a best practice library, top tips, guides and a space to write down key actions, which can be shared with their teams either remotely or face to face. The portal will be bespoke to each leader and will give them, we hope, confidence and support to keep conversations around engagement and empowerment alive all year round.
Finally we looked at the way we campaigned the survey.
3) Branding – this was a crucial change for us as we knew that the survey needed a refresh. So we stopped calling it employee opinion survey and referred to it as Your Voice. Not revolutionary but it does what it says on the tin. We produced some posters, pushed via our magazine, tv screens, social media, colleague app and director updates. And it must have worked as this year we increased our response rate by almost 35% taking us to almost 80%, which for an org where 70% of the population are non-office based – we were very pleased.
It’s still early days but we are hopeful that our leaders will embrace these tools and that our people feel more valued, connected, inspired and empowered because without them we can not continue to grow successfully.
