The success of a company lies in possessing employees who are motivated, committed and engaged so as to nurture successful relationships with customers and revel in enhanced productivity. But does this employment engagement survey module really work if not implemented properly?
The popularity of age-old employment engagement survey held annually to ensure engaging employees well is slowly plummeting, thanks to adoption of more comprehensive approaches done by companies. The traditional employment engagement survey is considered passé today which should rather be replaced by a real-time measurement of the factors which determine the passions and commitments put forth by workers throughout the year. The advent of the employee engagement concepts can be traced about 3 decades back when Gallup and other organizations brought forth their “engagement survey” module. This led to a plethora of other strategies and surveys determining the levels of engagement of employees which espouses to endow companies with better productivity, lower attrition, as well as absenteeism augmented rates of financial performance and immense customer satisfaction. However, when companies have gone extra miles to endeavor on such engagement ventures it has often been found that when it comes to real implementation, they have faced a whole lot of challenges. Here are the reasons why employee engagement surveys fail.
The Dearth of Critical Questions: One of the major reasons why engagement surveys fail is the dearth of specific questions that point to challenges which employees face or which drive them to be engaged in reality. Instead they concentrate on their perceptions, attitudes of managers and employees and job satisfaction. This does away with real implementations after the survey since they do know what the actual problems to address are.
HR teams are Held Responsible: To employees participating in the employment engagement survey is to just tick the boxes as they like since they know in most cases their opinions will not be valued and whatever decisions will be taken will ultimately be done by the Human Resource team.
Engagement Surveys Hardly Change Managerial Demeanor: Engagement surveys rarely play any role in bringing about transformations in managerial behavior and the inherent culture ruling companies. These issues can only be solved through rigorous efforts towards efficacious project management planning and strong commitments.
What is the Right Approach?
The right way to erase these obscurities is to address the issue with the right approach. The engagement survey should include questions related to motivation, involvement, autonomy, recognitions and rewards, teamwork, relationships, trust, communication, personal development and the likes. By addressing each of these it is imperative to put forth direct questions as to how much the employees feel them at work and how they think these factors are important for their professional lives. It is also essential to take the extra mile to bring about transformations in the way appraisals are made annually and instead do in intermittently throughout the year, change the recruitment process of assessment and the work ambience.
In short, it is crucial to ensure that the environment where employees come to work every day should be such which motivates and excites them to work harder and not simply where they are there only for the remuneration they are getting. Finally, implementations of the engagement actions should be done at employee levels only with support from line managers and HR personnel and this should be imbued in the employees well so that they actively take steps to execute them on their own.
