3 reasons for inaction after employee engagement surveys

    Posted on May 15, 2014 at 14:33 PM

    Employee engagement surveys often lead to little action.

    And it's no wonder that with the promise of increased productivity, improved financial performance, lower attrition and absenteeism and higher levels of customer satisfaction and innovation, that those organisations who have taken part in an employee engagement survey... are often disappointed with the results.

    But clearly, there’s a difference between pursuing employee engagement and actually achieving it.

    If you make an effort to address engagement and get no reward for it, that’s bad enough but there’s a cruel irony here that creates a far bigger problem.

    The ‘curse’ of employee engagement is that the process of trying to achieve something positive and beneficial for your employees can actually end up disengaging them. In other words, you can create exactly the opposite of what you intended.

    We think that this is because organisations ask questions in their employee engagement surveys about how employees feel about their work. And then answering these questions brings ‘problem areas’ to the front of people’s minds. If no action is then taken to address these issues, employees are left feeling worse than they did before, as you’ve falsely raised their expectations with an unspoken promise that you’ll do something as a result.

    Lack of concrete action, after an engagement survey, is the root cause of this employee engagement curse. Essentially, there are three reasons why no action is taken:

    1. Engagement surveys don’t ask the critical questions that will pinpoint exactly what action needs to be taken.
    2. Change is difficult.
    3. Engagement is wrongly perceived as just an ‘HR issue’.

    So, what’s the answer?  The answer is to turn these three negatives around.

    You can read about this in our article

    Why don't employee engagement  surveys work?

    This article was first published on HRZone.co.uk on 12 May 2014

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