The video for this blog post can be found on YouTube, and audio can be found on Spotify!
Welcome to episode 3 of Claire Shares. I’m so glad you’re here. I’m going to be sharing with you high energy, bite size videos, about all things talent attraction, talent acquisition and talent retention. These areas of HR and People Ops are my favorite and specialty, and I’m so excited to dive in with you.
Today’s talent retention topic is employee surveys and feedback gathering. Before we get started with that, I want to share with you my recommendation of the week!
Recommendation of the Week
I’m back repping another piece of HR swag. There’s many more to come, don’t worry. 😊 I want to introduce you to #HRSocialHour, one of my favorite online communities. The #HRSocialHour Twitter, or X, chat is the 2nd and 4thSunday of each month at 7 PM ET. I’ve made so many friends through this chat who have been amazing sounding boards throughout my HR career. If you’ve never participated in a Twitter chat, no worries! I’m here to help, just send me a message. I Hope to see you there! And although no new episodes are being recorded at this time, the HR Social Hour half hour podcast still exists out there and you can find hundreds of interviews with amazing HR professionals. I love to curate and share resources like this, so please reach out to me if there’s something you’re looking for.
Background on Today’s Topic
Onto our talent topic of the day – employee surveys and feedback gathering. I’ve been on a road show over the past few months meeting with my HR DOO, or HR Department of One, community working in small businesses. A common theme that’s come up in our conversations is how these HR DOOs have been meaning to do an engagement survey, gather feedback or do stay interviews. They have a feeling that more could be done to surprise and delight their employees, and make work more enjoyable, but they just haven’t been able to get to it! Maybe you’ve recognized that it’s been tough to get honest feedback from your employees. Especially if feedback hasn’t been asked for much before, employees can be hesitant to come forward and share. Depending on the culture in your organization, it may be helpful to use a third-party resource to solicit, make sense of, and help you act on the information. Sometimes just phrasing questions can be difficult and may be keeping you from getting started. I’d love to help you with this.
One HR Pro I spoke with mentioned to me wanting to do a survey about employee benefits to gather feedback from staff on what they would like to see offered in a benefits package, which I thought was a really good idea. That coupled with some research on your employees’ benefit usage can be helpful information for you when that time comes each year to consider changing your benefits. Your benefits package can definitely be a factor in retaining talent. Anyways, back to surveys and feedback gathering!
Gathering employee feedback on an ongoing basis is such an important part of your organization’s engagement and retention strategy. It stinks when someone leaves, and you learn it could have been prevented. Especially if you are looking to change tools, technology, or process within the company, gathering employee feedback will give you important insights you will want to consider in the process. Remember that even if you know the roles in your workplace really well, you don’t work in the day to day. Asking employees for feedback on their challenges and suggestions can help you ensure your changes are timely and most impactful right off the bat. Asking for feedback on an ongoing basis also helps you see trends and where “there’s smoke” so to speak, so you’ll see where it’s worth diving in deeper with 1:1 conversations to get more valuable context.
You’ll be surprised as well at all the good comments you’ll receive in surveys! When seeing a piece of positive feedback about working at the company, be sure to connect with that person 1:1 and see if they’re comfortable sharing more details. This may be an awesome opportunity to spotlight that employee within the organization and make them feel really special. It could also be an opportunity to showcase your culture and celebrate an employee achievement at work. This could then lead to great marketing content within your organization, as well as on social media channels for talent attraction purposes. We’ll definitely get into this more in a future episode!
Tactical Tips and Tricks
Let’s dive into some more tactical tips and tricks on this topic of employee surveys and feedback gathering. It’s important to think about questions like: what do we want the experience to be like for our employees here at our company? Do we have our mission, vision and values built into that employee experience? Answering these types of questions helps to inform us of talent attraction, acquisition and retention strategies. Asking for feedback on an ongoing basis helps you continually get that data on employee experience and where adjustments can be made to improve. You all know by now I love talking about people, process and technology, so let’s bring this framework to our topic today too!
People: Let’s start with people. Think about your various employee populations throughout the company and the types of roles they’re in. You may want to create surveys for different populations in your organization. Next, think about how your employees currently get their important company information. Last episode, we talked about workplace communication processes and different types of tools that may be used to aid in effective employee communication. Make sure you’re delivering the survey to your employees in a way that’s accessible for them and encourages participation. Think about how you can incorporate surveys into the day-to-day tools they may be using already. More on this in just a minute when we talk about the technology piece of people, process, and technology. Have HR and managers let employees know ahead of time when the survey will open and give some context as to why the survey is launching at this time or what you’re looking forward to hearing your thoughts on.
Process: Now let’s talk about process. First, we want to define our objective for launching the survey or starting to feedback gather. Next, we’ll write our questions based on the themes we want to measure. We also want to be sure that we are ready to change and act on the topics we are asking about it. Keep surveys short and to the point – that may mean something different to each HR Pro reading this, and that’s okay! Typically, ongoing surveys, or pulse surveys, are 10-15 questions. An annual engagement survey may be much longer. It’s always a good idea to add an open-ended text question at the beginning or end so employees can share whatever else they would like to. We want to make sure we think about the process as a whole and consider things such as timeline – when is the survey going to launch, what communications do we need as part of the process, when will it close, how much time will we need to analyze the data, etc. Consider the timing in your business as well. You may not want to launch the survey during a particularly busy season in your business. A key piece of the process is planning to follow through and share specific action plans with employees. I think we’ve all participated in an employee survey at one point or another and then never heard anything from company leadership following up on it. I know that’s happened to me. This makes it extremely hard to ever ask your employees in the future to help you and share their insights, because you’ve shown that you don’t follow up with next steps. This may be the most important piece to spend time on when making your process.
Technology: Last but not least, technology! There are many platforms you can use to launch your survey such as Microsoft Forms or Survey Monkey. If your organization has an HRIS system or employee engagement platform, you may have some survey functionality included in there also. We also have some survey tools to recommend here at Lighthouse too, so feel free to reach out. Before deciding on a tool to use, be sure to investigate the process of what it will be like to view, extract, and manipulate the data. You may learn it will be a bit clunky and that’s okay, but at least you know ahead of time what it will be like and can build the time needed to view and analyze the findings into your overall survey timeline. Back to making sure the survey is accessible for your various employee populations that I mentioned before. Think about how you can incorporate surveys into their day-to-day tools they already use, maybe a time clock app or self-service app that houses things they regularly access.
This week, think about prioritizing gathering employee feedback to improve employee engagement and retention, and then the people, process and technology involved to make that happen successfully. Thank you for being here with me. Again, I’m going to be sharing with you high energy, bite size videos all about all things talent attraction, talent acquisition and talent retention. These areas of HR and People Ops are my favorite and specialty, and I’m so excited to dive in with you. This work is what I do, if you need help with the tools, technology and process around how you attract, acquire and retain talent, reach out to me and let’s talk!
Claire is Coaching 