An employee engagement survey is an essential foundation for any organization that is serious about HR analytics. Unlike most other sources of HR data that generate “descriptive statistics,” employee surveys can answer “why” questions.

When thoughtfully designed and cleverly analyzed, employee surveys can provide fact-based, actionable insights into the drivers of (and impediments to) better business results. And when employee surveys are merged with other HR and learning and professionals development data, it is possible to make statistical linkages between your “people strategy” and your business outcomes—ranging from employee engagement, to turnover, to sales and profitability. This will provide much-needed evidence on the impact of your investments in people.

However, this potential often goes unrealized, because many HR departments are stuck in out-of-date ways of thinking about what engagement surveys can and should do for their organizations. To get more value out of your employee surveys, you must:

1. ask the right questions 

2. analyze the data cleverly 

3. create insightful reports.

Ask the Right Employee Survey Questions

Here are the key points to keep front and center in the design of the content of your employee survey:

• Your survey "real estate" is a valuable commodity—so use it wisely. You'll get more responses and more accurate answers when you keep your surveys fairly short.

• You should ask questions that fall into two different broad categories: outcomes and diagnostic items.

• The outcomes questions should be carefully chosen, small in number, and focused on your organization's key business goals. These include, but should also go beyond, employee engagement.

• The vast majority of your survey real estate should be devoted to diagnostic questions, because that is where the actionable insights will be found. Diagnostic items are designed to get employees' assessments on a wide range of workplace elements that might be helping to drive (or impede) key outcomes.

Analyze Employee Survey Data Cleverly

The principles that should guide your analysis of employee survey data include the following:

• Design your analysis to identify statistically the most important drivers of your organization's employee engagement and ability to achieve its business goals. The analysis needs to go far beyond benchmarking and measuring high and low scores.

• Use correlation analysis as a primary tool for identifying the drivers of each of the outcomes questions separately. (Click here for a discussion of diagnostic vs. outcome questions.)

• Systematically combine the findings from the correlation analyses with measures of organizational strength and weakness on each of your survey's diagnostic questions to create a rank ordering of areas of opportunity.

• Simultaneously examine the rank ordering of areas of opportunity for each business outcome to create a "short list" of the most important areas of opportunity.

• Use that short list to create fact-based, directional recommendations.

Create Insightful Reports About Employee Data

A well-designed and cleverly analyzed survey is necessary but not sufficient for creating actionable business intelligence. You also need to make it easy for busy leaders and managers to understand the results -- especially the specific actions your survey indicates will drive both improved employee engagement and better business results. Make sure leaders don't have to sort through piles of data and graphics to figure it out (or worse yet, to guess). Here are the key points to ensuring that your survey results will serve as a positive catalyst for change in your organization:

• Focus on quality of insight, rather than quantity of data. This is the "art" of analytics that makes the "science" understandable, compelling, and actionable.

• Avoid focusing too much attention on rankings of highest- and lowest-scoring survey items. Instead, report findings from the statistical analysis that links employee survey questions to both business outcomes and employee engagement.

• Create highly visual, analytics-enhanced, mass-customized reports for managers pointing them to the most important actions they need to take, based on the specific results for their group.

• Put detailed data tabulations in a well-organized appendix (avoid indecipherable data dumps).

• Use a succinct, well-written narrative to "tell the story.”

Want To Know More?

To receive our free easy-to-use checklist and more details on how to report insightfully on your employee survey data, please just send us an email at [email protected].