Organisations are increasingly realising the need to gain better understanding of their employees’ experience. This realisation is occurring as they make the connection between employee satisfaction and revenue growth. With 2017 just around the corner, now is a perfect time to look ahead at the employee insights trends expected to dominate in the New Year.
Qualtrics has identified four key trends expected to emerge in 2017:
1. Measuring across the entire employee lifecycle
Organisations can no longer expect the annual employee engagement surveys to capture all the insights needed to create an exceptional employee experience. This is why collecting feedback and measuring across the entire employee lifecycle, right from the time of onboarding employees to their exit, is critical for organisations to gain insights, into how they can improve the employee experience and retain top talent.
Bill McMurray, Managing Director, Asia Pacific and Japan, Qualtrics, said, “Qualtrics recommends organisations to focus employee lifecycle feedback programs on six key employee touch points; recruitment, onboarding, employee engagement surveys, engagement pulse surveys, developmental 180 and 360 surveys, and employee exit surveys to gain a true view of an employee’s experience.”
2. Pulse surveys will join the annual engagement survey
In recent years there has been a significant shift towards more continuous feedback. Pulse surveys are complementary surveys to employee engagement surveys. They let organisations dig deeper into issues that arise in the annual or bi-annual engagement surveys, or into a particular team/department. They also allow organisations to monitor trends over time and identify seasonal issues.
Bill McMurray said, “In 2017 we expect to see more organisations realising the value of annual census surveys and regular pulse surveys as the basis of their employee insights program. This will help give managers a clear direction towards improvement. They can then gain continual feedback and develop strategies to act on the data.”
3. Organisation-wide sharing of employee feedback
Digital analytics and research has shown that the best way to effect change across all levels of the organisation is to enable managers to act on data. In 2017, we’ll see managers and people leaders, be given visibility of employee feedback to understand how to be better leaders, how to listen to their employees, and how to make management decisions that will create better employee experiences.
Bill McMurray said, “With technologies that deliver customised real-time dashboards across the entire organisation, this shift towards sharing employee feedback across the organisation is inevitable and will help organisations pivot around key issues faster.”
4. Acting on the employee feedback
Before starting an engagement survey, the organisation must understand the strategy and how it will action the data. The most important part of collecting employee feedback is to initiate action on that feedback within an appropriate timeframe, to show employees that the organisation listens and values their feedback.
Bill McMurray said, “Employee engagement is directly linked to improved Customer Experience, which in turn is directly related to increased revenues, so it should always be a key focus area for organisations.”
“One of the best ways to run an employee lifecycle program is through real-time survey platforms that are sophisticated, yet easy-to-use. This way it is easy for employees to provide feedback and the organisation can view the feedback in real-time even before the survey is closed. This would enable the organisation to take action quickly on the data being collected.”
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