As with the recent Trump polling debarcle, statistics can be manipulated to tell the story you want people to hear. We share three tips to help you with your engagement survey analysis this year.
1. What is my cross section analysis telling me? I imagine many of us have diversity and inclusion goals somewhere in our mix this year. This type of analysis can help to identify outliers within groups in the organisation, used wisely this data gives you a useful starting point for specific equality, diversity and inclusion actions.
Beyond that you should be looking for insights on functions, job families, lifecycle stages (onboarding, exits, etc), senior leaders and middle management. Use Engagement as a proxy outcome to help guide change programmes, OD and any major people initiatives.
2. Don’t ignore the qualitative comments, look closely at the language being used to describe feelings of safety, trust, fairness, inclusion and communication this year, this type of sentiment will be useful to local managers – so ensure the comments are split out and shared per region/division at least, or per location (where you have hundreds of staff).
But remember that comments come from a minority of your respondents (beware red herrings and the loudest voices) – whereas quantitative data will represent all employees equally (or they should, if done well). Your main focus should rest with the quantitative results using comments / text entries to help add depth and richness.
3. Beware the benchmark comparisons, we’ve had an entirely different 12 months to anything we’ve seen before, readjust expectations accordingly.
Refocus attention on measures which track action and progress – especially teams agreeing on and implementing local actions to aid their own engagement.
Senior leaders are not exempt, quite the opposite: they are managers too and should be leading by example with local actions agreed with their direct reports (don’t look only at their division/function/region)
If you’d like to know more on effectively measuring employee engagement, take a look at our blog sharing the highlights from the CIPD’s recent evidence review.
