"There are only three measurements that tell you nearly everything you need to know about your organization's overall performance: employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and cash flow...It goes without saying that no company, small or large, can win over the long run without energized employees who believe in the mission and understand how to achieve it..."
Jack Welch, former CEO of GE
You may be asking yourself why spend the time and resources necessary to engage your employee's ideas and opinions? The answer resides in the research conducted by The Corporate Executive Board (CEB) that shows that companies with highly engaged employees demonstrate a 3-year revenue growth of 20.1%, compared to the 8.9% their industry peers will average. Besides these numbers, the cost of losing a talented disengaged employee may be as high as 1.5 times their salary.
One obvious and popular way to gain input is through a formal, anonymous survey emailed once a year to everyone. This is helpful also for small companies. If necessary, hire an outside consultant to gather the information and create a report so you have a baseline of how the company is doing.
The following four questions will get at the heart of issues inside your company:
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What is working well (on this team/department/company) and how do we build on this?
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What is missing, that if we had it, would help us be more successful?
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Which of these missing components should be addressed first?
These questions can be asked in an anonymous online survey or interview style by meeting one-on-one with each employee. It is important that the results of the interviews be shared within two weeks and that transparency be the norm. In other words, do not sugar-coat critical feedback, but rather be vulnerable to your role in the issues as a boss by letting them know you do not have all the answers.
According to a Forbes October 2013 article on employee engagement, most surveys only yield a 30-40% return. This article advises the leaders of an organization to take charge of improving this rate by:
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Making the emailed survey subject heading and cover letter come from the department's boss and not human resources
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Answer the question WIIFM or What Is in It for Me? How will the employee's life improve by completing the survey? Were any changes made as a result of previous surveys?
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In the cover letter use past objections to completing surveys, i.e., my voice won't matter or it is better to say nothing than something critical. Show them how these objections are not true for this survey
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Let them know when the leader has completed their survey to lead by example.
However helpful a survey's information is to you, reaching out to gather employee input has to be continual and not just once a year. In addition to the survey, try these ideas to encourage input:
- Use technology tools that can access the questions that are on the minds of most employees, i.e., Google Moderator, etc.
- Choose a day of the week, if you are a small company, to have an open forum for questions...maybe call it, What's on your mind Monday?
- Create off-site retreats to have key employees begin to solve some of the problems that are in their area of influence. In other words, offer those employees closest to the problem to solve the problem. You may need to offer training and resources to help them do this but you will have a much more engaged workforce as a result.
Most importantly, do not ask for input if you are not going to do anything with it!
Question for You:
Do you feel the need to better understand how your employees feel about you as a boss and about the organization as a whole? Are your current methods of gathering input just scratching the surface or do your surveys have a poor return rate? Are you losing talented employees?
Action for You:
Begin by understanding that every size organization...even two employees... will gain from asking for regular, consistent feedback. I recommend a formal survey at least once a year and the tips mentioned above will help yield a greater return rate. Regular, consistent feedback is needed beyond the annual survey by creating forums to challenge current practices and have employees find solutions to solve them.
"If you work in an urgent-only culture, the only solution is to make the right things urgent."
Seth Godin, author of Linchpin
