New research: employee engagement surveys need deeper analysis

Over 50% of organisations say that the single most important question that their employee engagement surveys need to answer is what activities and areas are seen as important to their people.

Head Light today releases the findings from its research into how HR organisations need to access from their employee engagement surveys.

Ian Lee-Emery, Managing Director, Head Light comments. “Over 100 HR and Learning and Development decision makers took part in our survey – and their feedback is strong. Over 50% said that the single most important element of what they look for from their employee engagement survey results is a clear understanding of what their people see as important – and subsequently, where engagement efforts should be focused.” 

Survey respondents were asked to rank the most important three questions which they needed their employee engagement scores to answer. Over 65% of all respondents included the need to understand what is important to their employees in their top three rankings.

Lee-Emery adds, “For years, organisations have invested in employee engagement programmes unsupported by evidence as what is important to employees – and whether time and money should be invested elsewhere to engage its people.  Very few engagement surveys go beyond creating a single rating to explore this measure of importance to the individual.”

“Our research also indicates that organisations want to now pinpoint the trouble spots or areas of disengagement. This means that we need to be able to drill deeper into engagement scores, differences between specific managers, or locations or working practices.  Indeed, cutting the data in any way they wish to find out why these differences exist, and what action to take.” 

And it seems that the well-researched link between engagement and performance now also prompts the right questions being answered. Organisations now want to know how their engagement levels impact the ability to achieve the business goals or KPIs with nearly 50% of people saying this is one of their most important needs.

Debbie Hance, Head of Business Psychology at Head Light, continues,“The team at Head Light has taken these survey results on board, and the conversations we have had with clients, we know that it is time for engagement tools to change.  Employee engagement is no longer about a single rating score: it’s about understanding how engagement impacts our ability to perform as a business and reach our goals, and to better understand the importance and effect of our engagement activities.  For this reason, we have built in these capabilities into our enhanced on-line Talent En-Gauge® survey and analytics tool.”

Ian Lee-Emery concludes, “We believe that our on-line Talent En-Gauge® takes employee engagement to the next level – and provides the organisation with the information needed to make critical engagement decisions.”