In the next edition of our “Building your employer brand” series, we look at arguably the most crucial step of the discovery phase – measuring employee engagement. You can brainstorm ideas about your employer brand all day long, but unless you practice what you preach you will be wasting your time altogether. Not only will the survey act as a validation for your employer value proposition, but it will also uncover your current employer brand strengths and highlight any weak spots that you need to work on to improve.
Step 3: Measuring Employee Engagement
Following on from Step 2: Assembling an employer brand team, we delve into the key steps you need to take when measuring employee engagement as part of your employer brand discovery process. Here’s a few things to consider to get you started:
Capturing responses
In an ideal world you will get a completed survey from every single member of your organisation, however we know that this can be a challenge particularly in larger organisations. You want to focus on collecting a fair representation of data in terms of departments / locations, so our advice would be to engage your employer brand team to help you with this. Instead of letting an email from SurveyMonkey go unread in an employee’s inbox, make sure you communicate the objectives of the survey to your people in person, and make it as simple as possible for people to get involved. You will get the best responses from anonymous surveys, so consider using a third party for this stage to get the most authentic results.
Key engagement questions to ask
When measuring engagement you will want to include a variety of questions, but areas you should definitely include are: Employee motivation, commitment, job satisfaction, employee purpose, career development, company vision / mission values, recognition and culture. We would advise having employees respond to most questions using a word scale (E.g: Strongly Disagree / Disagree / Slightly Disagree / Neither Agree nor Disagree OR N/A / Slightly Agree / Agree / Strongly Agree), then delving into specific feedback with free text feedback options too.
Measuring your potential employer value proposition
In addition to measuring engagement and obtaining specific feedback comments, you will want to use this as an opportunity to test the strength of your potential employer value proposition (or EVP). Your Employee Value Proposition (EVP) as a set of associations and offerings provided by an organisation in return for the skills, capabilities and experiences an employee brings to the organisation. Your EVP pillars can be related to compensation, benefits, career, culture and environment factors. You should have a sense of what this could be based upon initial discussions with your employer brand team and existing data you have, so use this as an opportunity to test the strength of these in your people survey.
Structuring the questions
Once you know the questions you want to ask, you can start to put them together into SurveyMonkey (or other survey provider). It’s good to ask the same question in two different ways to ensure you are getting an accurate data reading but be mindful of how long your survey is. The most effective surveys are made up of around 30/40 questions. This should allow you to cover enough topics without taking up too much of your employees’ time.
Delving into the data
The most important stage – delving into the data from your employee engagement survey! Here you will be able to pinpoint areas you are excelling in, what needs improvement and examine specific feedback from the survey. You can segment the data across departments / locations / seniority level and other key demographics to get a clearer picture of your employer brand positioning too.
Finding your strengths
Map out all areas you scored highly in – this will vary from organisation to organisation, but generally if you have 80% or more respondents answering as agree to strongly agree with you can list this as a strength for your employer brand. Do be mindful of any questions that were worded in a negative sense though (e.g. I do not feel empowered to make impactful decisions in work) – for questions structured in this way you would need to be looking for 80% or more responding as disagree to strongly disagree.
Working on your weaknesses
Similarly to the above, you will be able to pinpoint your weak spots for questions that the majority of employees answer in a negative sense. You can also tag individual comments with sentiments such as negative / positive as you review each in order to segment this data easily. Any negative comments should be evaluated in case there are any key action points you want to take. Sit down with the employer brand team to review these together.
Next steps for employees
The strongest employer brands come from employers who are able to listen and adapt to their people, and while you may not be in a position to deliver on every employee request, you want to devise a plan to adapt in areas you are able to. You can share the overall results with your organisation (without disclosing the nitty gritty feedback) and highlight your plans to improve.
Looking for more assistance in delivering an employee engagement and EVP survey? Reach out to a member of the Holler™ team today.
