Employee surveys are a crucial part of any internal communications strategy. But what you do with your employee survey results is what really makes a positive impact at your organization.
To create a successful organization, you’ll need to do more than find talented team members—you’ll also need to keep talent at your company. But for many businesses, the latter is easier said than done.
Many organizations remedy this problem with employee surveys. By gathering employee feedback, internal communicators can learn what they need to know to make the situation better. Use employee feedback as a starting point for engaging your employees and acting on their suggestions and insights.
With an internal communications tool like ContactMonkey, you can easily analyze your employee feedback and convert it into actionable information. You can get set up with ContactMonkey in 24 hours by booking a free 15-minute demo.
Sharing Employee Survey Results: 6 Easy Steps To Follow
Once you’ve finished conducting your employee survey and gathered the results, you may think that the main part is over. But we hate to break it to you: there’s still some way to go.
Gathering and acting on employee feedback are two sides of the same coin. It’s a continuous process, and one of the most important steps is effectively communicating your employee survey results to your team. This will kickstart the process of analysis, brainstorming, and deliberation, ultimately leading to an action plan to incite change across your company.
We help simplify the process of communicating employee engagement survey results by breaking down the process into 6 simple steps. Let’s take a walk-through.
1. Say thanks!
The key thing to remember about employee surveys is that they are a continuous part of your workplace operations. When one survey is done, the next one is just around the corner. To ensure that employees are motivated to take part in your surveys, it’s important to show them that their feedback is valued. First and foremost, this means thanking employees for taking the time to participate.
It also means explaining to employees how their results will be used and what changes their input will help implement. For instance, if you want to increase workplace retention and engagement, you’ll want to inform employees that their suggestions will go towards building a more fun, rewarding, and engaging work environment.
To show your gratitude, we recommend sending an appreciation email to your team following your initial survey, thanking your team for their time, and explaining how their input helps.
You can also use this opportunity to schedule a meeting where you’ll share your employee survey results and get team input on next steps. More about this in the following section!
2. Share your employee survey results
Before you decide how to act on employee survey results, share your findings with employees to set the right expectations. Employees are likely eager to hear survey results, so sharing the results quickly will keep them happy.
A Gallup survey showed that employees who trust their company’s leadership are twice as likely to say they’ll remain with the organization a year later.
To implement a company-wide change, you need to be aligned with leadership to see if there’s a possibility of making a change based on leadership goals. Otherwise, you can’t do much with the employee survey results.
Once you’ve presented the results to executives, share the survey details with the entire company. Consider the ideas below for making the information widely available.
- Record and share a video. If employees are spread across time zones, a video might be a great way to share the results. If you can get leadership to be a part of the video, that’s even better. Once you’ve recorded a video, upload it online and share it on various communication channels—Slack, Teams, Facebook for Business. Employees can add questions to chat threads on these platforms for you to answer.
- Host a company all-hands in-person or via Zoom. Leadership can share the employee survey results and answer questions live. We’d still recommend that you record this session and share it with employees on communication platforms so they can refer back to it at a later time if they need to.
- Send a company-wide email including the survey results and a message from leadership. Along with the employee survey results, send a personalized email from the CEO to explain the employee survey’s intention and its learning. Share the employee survey results with everyone in the company. Using ContactMonkey for your employee surveys, you can add a pulse survey to your email for gauging employees’ feelings about the results and track employee engagement, such as open rates, click rates, and read time.
By being open about your survey results, you and leadership are likely to see more buy-in from employees about suggested changes. They’ll know why you’re recommending adjustments because they’ve seen the feedback you’re working from.
If your organization has internal or external regulations around email privacy, use ContactMonkey’s anonymous email tracking to gather email metrics while maintaining your employees’ privacy.
3. Schedule a team discussion and gather any additional feedback
Once you share your survey results with employees, they may want to discuss them in more detail. Set up a follow-up discussion where employees can ask managers and leadership any questions they may have. These discussions are also a great opportunity for you to collect any information missing in the surveys and ask questions to fill in gaps in your understanding.
You can host follow-up discussions in small groups or a company-wide meeting.
If your company’s remote, you can host these sessions online too. With ContactMonkey’s event management feature, you can create events, embed invites right into your email, and track responses:
If your organization has an existing upward feedback culture, employees may be willing to participate and be forthcoming. If not, make it clear to employees in your memos about the discussion that you want to hear constructive feedback. Employees might still be reluctant to participate.
If you need to follow-up on survey results with only a segment of your workforce, use custom email lists to reach out to them while reducing the amount of irrelevant emails in your other employees’ inboxes. With ContactMonkey’s List Management feature, you can create your own lists—without needing IT—that integrate with your Human Resource Information System (HRIS) like Workday and ADP, as well as Azure Active Directory, so they’ll update automatically.
4. Analyze your employee engagement survey results and establish priorities
You’ve shared the employee survey results with the entire company. Now comes the hard work—using those insights to make positive changes.
You may be tempted to address the big picture problems mentioned in the survey first. We recommend doing the opposite—resolving short-term problems.
How do you identify immediate priorities? If an issue places your organization in a chronic firefighting mode, chances are that’s an immediate priority. If your company is constantly dealing with attrition, pay attention to the challenges and concerns employees mention in their survey. If you notice a pattern across responses, focus on addressing those concerns to improve employee retention.
When your company is on completely stable ground, you can start thinking about making innovative changes. You can work toward long-term priorities if there are no immediate threats to the company’s success.
5. Ask your team to help create an employee engagement action plan
Once you’ve gathered all the information you need from employees through surveys and follow-up discussions, it’s time to act. Decide how you will implement changes based on the employee survey results.
Analyze employee survey results and note the most frequently mentioned pain points. From there, you can brainstorm with the leaders in relevant departments to come up with feasible solutions.
Once you’ve brainstormed ideas, choose one or two solutions you want to commit to as a group for every employee pain point. Write down the logistics of implementing each solution to get a sense of whether they’re feasible. If an idea seems within reach, create a timeline to complete that initiative.
6. Continue to communicate employee engagement updates
Inform employees about changes as you implement them within the organization. This transparency holds leadership accountable and helps employees ease into change.
How can you communicate changes along the way? Consider presenting them in a company-wide memo, or you might share them via video internal communications or presentation at an all-hands meeting. After sharing the updates, encourage employees to discuss in your all-hands meeting and on communication platforms like Slack.
Measure Employee Engagement Survey Results
Measure progress by identifying, setting, and tracking key performance indicators (KPIs). Say the company wants to reduce attrition based on the survey results. Leadership might set a goal for the next quarter of reducing employee turnover by 5%.
Surveys are also a way to measure progress, especially when the improvement might be more qualitative. ContactMonkey collates employee comments in the surveys and auto-calculates a score based on responses and ratings:
If your numbers show the company heading in a positive direction, try to understand which parts of the changes worked and continue using those methods.
Don’t forget to share the progress of these initiatives with employees—celebrating wins can help boost morale across the board! Sharing progress with employees reiterates that the company values their feedback, helps you earn their trust, and can boost employee morale.
Employee Surveys Aren’t a One-and-Done Deal
Although annual employee surveys are very common, they’re not necessarily advisable or adequate. Employee surveys should guide your organization toward continuous improvement. Based on your employee survey results, try to work on small incremental changes. Finally, track these changes’ impact on employee engagement through targeted pulse survey questions.
ContactMonkey’s a robust all-in-one internal communications tool that lets you create, share, and track employee surveys.
