MarketTools Blog

This is the third in a series of posts about best practices for setting up an effective employee feedback program.
•    View Part 1: Setting the Stage for Your Employee Feedback Program
•    View Part 2: Employee Feedback Survey Design: Asking the Right Questions

In my last two blog posts, I outlined the steps required to set up an employee feedback program, including organizational requirements and survey design. Today we’ll get into the fun part – analyzing employee satisfaction survey results and taking action!

Analyzing Employee Survey Results:  Turn Data into Wisdom –and Avoid “Analysis Paralysis”
One of the biggest challenges with running a comprehensive employee feedback survey program is that the rich amount of data delivered can be overwhelming. You may feel compelled to pay equal attention to all data collected, and it might seem impossible to get to the essential truths. The analytic tools in an enterprise feedback management solution (like MarketTools CustomerSat) can help determine the short list of improvement areas that will have the most impact on increasing employee satisfaction.

A best practice is to begin with a Key Driver analysis, which identifies those attributes most highly correlated with overall employee satisfaction but where performance is relatively weak. The first phase is to identify the key topic areas that drive overall employee satisfaction.  The next phase is to identify the key attributes that drive satisfaction within each of these key topic areas.

Once the key areas are identified, it’s important to drill down to identify whether the identified areas of improvement are company-wide or limited to defined segments of the company (such as role, tenure, region, or organization), based on the rating criteria selected.  This will help determine which of the targeted areas for improvement are systemic and should be addressed globally, and which ones should be addressed at the local level.

Presenting Results: Do it Quickly and Make it Easy to Digest
Employee survey results should be presented in varying levels of detail to make it relevant to roles within the organization – starting with a top line analysis, then diving deeper into detailed analysis and organization-specific analysis.

Top line analysis: The top line analysis should be presented within a week of survey close, and should provide C-level management with performance on the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) across and within business units, by identified segments.  If your survey was conducted as an additional wave in a continuing survey, the top line analysis should also provide trending information on KPIs over time.  

Detailed analysis: The detailed analysis provides granular information to the top line analysis and includes reporting for all questions in the survey; key driver analyses to determine priority areas of focus; and a deep dive via cross-tabs to detect the level of significant difference between employee segments or by employee tenure.  The open-ended comments should be categorized into themes and used to effectively provide further insight into areas identified as strengths and weaknesses.

Organization-specific analysis: Each of the broad organizations within a company, as identified by function/senior VP for example,  should receive a key driver analysis for findings within their own area, so that they understand what drives satisfaction of their employees as well as their employees’ comments. Ideally, these reports should be created for them, along with access to their raw data for further exploration.

Getting the Right Information to the Right People: Determine Internal Feedback Requirements
It’s important to determine information needs by role in the organization. C-level executives and Human Resources will usually have access to all employee survey results.  They generally require the ability to slice and dice the data by business group and region in order to identify pockets of vulnerability versus systemic problems across the organization. 

Business group leaders and region leaders will most likely want to see a high-level analysis of the overall company results and then have the ability to do a deep dive into their own group’s data.  Depending on roles, you may decide to control access to data across business groups as well as data about regional differences.

Employees are usually provided with an even more general overview of the company survey results than what their leaders receive, but they may also have access to detailed data about their own team for action planning.

For any level of management, variables that could make it easy to identify an employee should not be included in the survey reports. If an analysis needs to be run with the identifying variable(s), then reports should be configured to preserve anonymity.

Action Planning:  Ensure Survey Results Lead to Improvements
The analysis of Key Drivers allows you to identify and prioritize areas for action, and target initiatives that will have the most impact on building employee satisfaction and loyalty.  Management should determine short-term versus more long-term initiatives, as well as identify some quick wins that produce improvements that are visible to employees as a result of the survey program.

The process for planning and implementing your employee survey  should have generated a strong level of employee engagement – and that level of interest and awareness should be maintained during action planning.  When communicating the survey results and follow up action to employees, you should indicate which initiatives will be pursued on an organization-wide basis.  Idea forums and ad-hoc surveys will allow you to elicit management and employee input for these organization-wide initiatives.

Business-specific results should also be communicated to the relevant teams and business groups, which can set up task forces to formulate “local” initiatives and establish accountability.  HR should monitor the follow-up action plans, and progress on initiatives can also be tracked via ad hoc surveys.

Reviewing the Survey Effort
After the survey effort concludes and while the experience is still fresh, the employee survey planning team should assess the survey program and identify areas for improvement. Be sure to identify what went well, what could be improved from a process point of view, and which questions or other survey content will need to be revised.  Be sure to review the open-ended comments to benefit from employee suggestions for improvements.  

Stay tuned for the final installment in this series of best practices for employee satisfaction survey programs, which will conclude with an assessment of when it's time to seek outside help to run your program.