Transcript

Hey, welcome to POPS, the show that shows you how to shift from human resources, paperwork to people operations for the new world of work. How by answering one question at a time. I’m David Watson, Product Marketing Manager at Zenefits. Here to help answer the question, I want to survey my team to gauge engagement.

Where do I start? So first we should ask ourselves what are some of the benefits of an engaged team? While employee engagement is key to company success survey shows 71% of managers believe it’s the most important factor to drive a mission forward.

But what’s interesting is even though employee engagement is viewed so critically, only 33% of employees feel engaged at work. So back in 2020, Gallup, a leader in employee engagement studies noted that we’ve actually seen the most significant drop in employee engagement since 2000. So down almost 20% in such a short period of time, and the drop makes sense.

Employees are struggling with lingering pandemic effects. Stress around health concerns and family needs, social unrest, inflation, and other new conversations that seem to come up every other day. But an unengaged workforce translates to lost revenue. So approximately 500 billion a year is lost by companies from lack of productivity, responsibility, timeliness, turnover, hiring, and lack of motivation to get work done.

So how do we address the need and align to create happier, more engaged employees? The three big buckets to engage employees are giving them a voice. Understanding their needs and taking action. So giving a voice ensures you’re providing employees with an outlet to express opinions. The goal would be to scale feedback and align opportunities for feedback with all types of employees, summer introverts, and summer extroverts in offering channels that meet the needs of both is key.

So understanding needs is really about drawing insights from all of that great feedback. This is where you’d curate trends and identify potential opportunities to invest in your employees. And of course, lastly, taking action. So one of the most important of the three, which shows that you’re really listening.

So whether it’s creating transparency around upcoming initiatives or just sharing learnings and insights and deploying new programs, employees expect to see this to show that you’re truly listening. So once you understand the these concepts, you’ll be ready to implement a system to track employee feedback on a regular basis.

Anonymizing your surveys is also a crucial detail in understanding where your employees currently sit. It enables them to be honest and open about their feelings and not afraid of repercussions and punishment for being honest. By creating and customizing surveys, you’ll be able to gather actual information at scale along with a few other items, such as developing a better understanding of employee sentiment and being able to take action from an intuitive insight.

So understanding the best investments to improve employee productivity and. So as your team grows, you can make it easier to understand their needs with employee engagement surveys, develop customized questions and deliver engaging surveys at scale to really understand what’s on your team’s mind and spark change in the right direction.

The more you know, the more you can instill change to retain top talent that you’ve hired. Some questions you can ask yourself before you get started are, how do you gather employee feedback today? Do your employees know the available channels to provide feedback throughout your organization? And do you use any third party tools to facilitate surveys?

Some other things to consider are, is it easy for you to even manage survey responses? I excited that you took the time to research this topic with us. So thanks for joining me. If you have any questions about this, please click the link in the show notes, or if you’ve got other ideas and feedback about our show, send them to [email protected] Take care.