Organizational cost-cutting measures are on the uptick, and employee listening is often an area that gets questioned, especially since it can be tricky to directly demonstrate the ROI. The organization is spending both time and money on the efforts, and leaders may be wondering how to know if it’s worth it.
Rather than answer the question, “Is our employee survey worth the time and expense?” HR leaders should shift the question to “Do we have reliable data about our people that can be used for identifying risks, improving decision making, and ensuring we are on track to meet our strategic priorities?” In other words, reframe the survey less as a nice to have and more as a critical source of business intelligence.
Here’s how to frame the survey:
Focus on the Decisions Built on Employee Feedback Data.
For those of us mired in employee listening, metrics such as response rate or a boost in percent favorables matter a lot. But your leadership likely won’t get that granular, and will care more about the business outcomes. So what about employee listening helps them do their jobs better?
Here’s a starting point: If you know the organization’s strategic priorities, highlight the ways employee data can help leadership. For example, if regrettable turnover is a concern right now, show how the data helps identify the issues most likely to affect retention and the areas where action is likely to have the greatest impact. Giving leadership concrete actionable ideas helps direct their efforts in a way they can trust. This can be done both reactively to understand issues that have happened such as turnover, safety incidents or unionization as well as proactively, determining what helps high performers get up to speed faster, etc.
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Connect your Feedback Solutions to Specific Business Problems
The best way to defend a budget is to show that it’s able to make or save the organization money. For example, consider the retention example above. Replacing high performers is a very expensive task; if you can show leadership how the data can identify groups most at risk for leaving, or identify specific reasons for leaving, such as lack of development opportunities, resources can be directed at improving the situation rather than the more costly option of replacing employees.
Surveys alone don’t fix problems, but they do help leaders see the problems earlier on than if there isn’t any opportunity to hear from employees. A well-crafted survey program, such as the kind OrgVitality designs, ensures that organizations are asking the right questions to get the necessary feedback most relevant and impactful to the organization.
If leaders don’t have this data, they’ll still make decisions, but they won’t have all the pertinent information. Without concrete data, decisions are more likely to be based on anecdotal evidence, the loudest voices in the room, or leadership’s “gut instincts” rather than what employees actually think.
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Put the Data into Context
Executive presentations are a great opportunity to show the power of a survey program, but storytelling is key. It’s not enough just to report the numbers; you need a compelling reason why it matters. For example, if the feedback shows that employees want more career development opportunities it’s not enough to simply state that. Say something like, “Career growth is one of the strongest predictors of employees' commitment to the organization, yet it is one of our lowest-rated areas.” This shifts the emphasis away from employees seemingly complaining about something to an organizational risk that leadership can’t ignore. The more data you have, the more you can identify these nuanced insights and help leadership intervene in targeted, meaningful ways rather than guessing.
Show the Impact of your Program
Surveys that just ask for feedback but don’t do anything with the data rightfully come under criticism from both leadership and employees. But the best programs, like the ones designed by OrgVitality, focus on what happens after the survey closes. At OrgVitality, managers get micro-training from the start of the survey process to better help them understand and act on the data. Our Action Prioritization tool focuses them on the areas where they can have the greatest impact. We have built-in nudges and reminders to hold them accountable. Leadership may not want to hear the details about these types of tools, but they do want to know:
Answering these questions help leaders see the worth in the survey, but it’s important to be specific to your organization. Just as no two employee surveys should ever look the same across different companies, neither should the answers to the above. Name the decisions that will be better made with data. Show concrete examples of how action plans resulted in tangible improvements. Help leaders understand that employee feedback enables them to systematically understand what is helping or hindering employees, which then can focus leadership on the actions that will have the greatest impact.