Employee Engagement, Part 2: What Do the Survey Results Mean?

How to identify opportunities to increase engagement, retention and productivity.

Unemployment is down and the U.S. economy is the strongest it has been in more than 10 years. The downside of a robust economy is always the potential for increased attrition. You may have heard about the research from the Corporate Executive Board showing that highly engaged employees are 87% less likely to leave their companies than disengaged workers, but there’s so much more to it than that.

Why Is Employee Engagement a Priority?

According to Gallup’s 2014 State of the American Workplace study, organizations in the top-quartile of employee engagement report the following key performance indicators (KPIs):

• 25%-65% lower turnover;
• 48% fewer safety incidents; and
• 41% fewer quality issues.

Are turnover, safety and quality important to your bottom line? Let’s see if we can get you there.

In Part 1 of this three-part series, we covered setting up an employee engagement survey (see “Employee Engagement, Part 1: Start with Baby Steps,” Pipeline, May 2015). In this article, we will dissect what that information means. We will relate it to the industry and the potential changes you can make in the short term and long term to increase your engagement, retention and productivity.

Analyzing your Survey Results: Overall Score

Finally, your engagement survey results are in. What do you do with them now?

The overall score is where everyone looks first. As a number, it doesn’t give you specific or actionable information by itself. It is, however, a down-and-dirty measurement of overall engagement, easy to report on and benchmark for progress.

A Deeper Dive

Next, let’s talk about what that overall score number really means. Your score combines ratings in these key categories:

1. Communication and Company Perception
2. Job Satisfaction
3. Supervisor and Training

To understand how truly engaged your employees are, it’s best to look at the areas of the survey separately.

Communication and Company Perception Results

This is possibly the most important section of the employee engagement survey. Communication and Company Perception must be high in order to have loyal, engaged employees.

If employee results in this section are low, ask yourself two questions about your organization.

1. Are you communicating the mission/vision of your company?
2. Does the mission/vision of your company directly relate to agents and their work goals?

If your agents don’t have a sense of purpose, believe in what your company stands for, AND believe that they play an important part, you have a problem. The problem is that as soon as a better opportunity comes along, your employees will take it. They have not emotionally invested in your business, and they feel no strong sense of purpose in their role.

What if you find that your agents completely understand the mission and vision of the company, but still have given you low scores in this section? That brings up another tough question that you need to ask yourself: Are you walking the walk? Does your mission/vision honestly and accurately represent your company and its values? For example, do you talk a lot about great customer experiences, but only reward agents for the shortest calls? Do you measure first-call resolution, but ignore that metric at performance review time?

If there’s enough of this double-talk built into your systems, agents will both get the message and lose respect for your organization, probably at about the same time—after you’ve invested time and money training them. If the real business goals are different from what your mission/vision says, it’s time to change the message—and possibly change the agents. Be honest, save everyone a lot of time, and hire the agents you really want to do the work you really want done. It may sound harsh, but I think you’ll find that it’s better for everyone in the long run.

Job Satisfaction Results

Agents who report a low score in Job Satisfaction are also likely to leave. In addition to being proud of their workplace and its mission, employees need to feel somewhat satisfied in their role and believe that they have a solid future ahead of them in the organization.

Low scores in the Job Satisfaction section relate to other sections, so you should consider that data to determine a sense of overall job satisfaction. For example, if an agent scores high in other sections and low in this one, the motivation and recognition programs may not be relevant to them or they may be unhappy about their relationships with the colleagues or the culture at large.

On the other hand, if an agent scores high in Job Satisfaction, but low in the other sections, he or she is an employee at risk of attrition. You haven’t provided them with a strong enough reason to stay if another opportunity arises.

Supervisor and Training Results

Were you aware that the top reasons behind employee attrition are poor supervisors and training? Study after study confirms that bad management drives out good employees. However, if you’ve earned high scores for Company Perception and poor scores for Supervision and Training, you should count yourself lucky. Changing your communication programs, missions, or job descriptions can become big tasks depending on your starting point. Upgrading training or evaluating supervisors has built-in solutions and can turn around quickly.

The best source of training improvement guidance will come directly from your agents. Your experienced agents will have a wealth of knowledge to share and will appreciate contributing to an improved program. Your newer agents will remember what they didn’t know—and what they wished they had known—when they started on the job. The rookies will have fresh opinions on your onboarding process, and possibly insight from their previous jobs. Assign a strong communicator to write down the recommendations that come in during a series of collaborative discussions with your agents and turn them into simple instructional documents. Don’t waste too much time choosing fonts and clipart, clarity is more important than fancy formatting. You and your team will be able to turn a weak training program to robust in a surprisingly short amount of time.

To find and flag poorly performing and unpopular supervisors, conduct additional employee surveys that you can filter by manager. While it’s never fun to discipline or fire a poor performer, the impact of a bad leader on employee attrition cannot be overstated. If you score low here and fail to make changes that your agents can see, your engagement scores and retention of top talent will remain low.

How to Improve Overall Engagement

It’s always fun to see that big number start to creep up. Let’s give you some simple steps to move your overall score in the right direction.

• Clarify your organization’s stated mission. Does it truly reflect the purpose behind your work? Is it clear what drives the leadership? If not, can you add language that accurately explains what is important and what is valued? Be honest and don’t apologize for ambition.
• Communicate the mission clearly. Then, communicate the ways in which your agents fit into and contribute to the mission and goals. Everyone wants to be part of a shared purpose. Agents who understand and feel like they’re a member of the team will be more engaged and willing to follow your guidance toward improvement.
• Connect the mission to the rewards. You probably already have a reward or incentive program. Look it over closely. If it doesn’t already tie agent performance to the stated mission and goals, then change it so that it does.
• Communicate, communicate, communicate. When you make a change, it is essential that you communicate how the change relates to the company mission and department goals. Then communicate what the agents can do to help achieve the goals. Change must be based on the big-picture vision. Anything else disengages and distracts employees and creates a culture of misunderstanding, gossip and lack of focus.
• Change starts with your agents. Listen to your agents; it’s likely you’ll learn more from them than they’ll learn from you. Positioned on the front line, they have intimate knowledge of your customers and your leadership team. They have a huge impact on your culture and the success of any initiatives. Don’t miss the opportunity to benefit from their experience. Pushing management’s “Flavor of the Day,” from the top down and without agent input will deflate engagement and retention, and is likely to fail (more about avoiding the “flavor of the day” habit in the next article in this series).

Key Takeaways

High scores may motivate high achievers like you, but when it comes to employee engagement, it’s important to look past the numbers. Measuring your current state of engagement is a crucial milestone, but truly engaged employees require both hard thinking and soft skills from leadership. Commit to building a stronger employee experience that grows retention rates and encourages innovation. These three concepts will help you get there.

1. Understand what it is about your company that inspires your agents, and keep that flame burning brightly.
2. Understand how training and supervision can affect the morale of your agents and make the changes needed to improve these resources.
3. Talk directly to your agents on a regular basis to understand their needs and hear how they can contribute to your organization’s mission.

Now that you know how to create an engagement study, and how to analyze and implement survey results, watch for the final article in this series. In Part 3, I’ll help you with change management and troubleshooting the initiatives that came out of your employee engagement program.