7 Steps To Effective Employee Surveys To Build Your Employer Brand

Posted by: Krishna De | Posted on: August 27th, 2007 | 1 Comments | Posted in: Employee engagement, Employer Branding, Ireland, Professional speaker

When building your employer brand, understanding the perception of your employer brand with key stakeholders is critical to nurturing your employer brand.

With easier access to on-line tools to distribute and manage employer branding surveys, how can you ensure that you get the most robust results possible?

Here are seven actions you can take to support your employer brand strategy:

1. Ensure ownership by the leadership team – consider how you can get your leadership team to support you in the roll out and completion of the surveys. One strategy I have used very effectively has been to establish key performance indicators for the percentage number of responses you want to receive. It is not unusual to have returns to employee surveys as low as just forty percent, but this can be significantly increased if you engage your colleagues in the survey roll-out.

2. Ask the right questions – if your organisation is one that often uses surveys and 360 feedback tools, take care that you do not have survey overload. By ensuring that you are asking the essential questions you need responses to, ideally with 12 questions or less, will make it less onerous for respondents to reply to the survey. If the questions are able to be understood, jargon free and have good face validity in being understood, you will make it easier for participants to reply.

3. Engage your participants – implementing a communication and engagement plan around your survey, you will help participants understand the reasons for the survey and why their input is needed and valued. Connect the reasons for doing the survey to the context of your market place, your business performance and your people and organisation strategy.

4. Take care on the timing – if you plan to implement an employee survey each year, make sure that you implement it at the same time each year. If you find that there are certain circumstances that make you hesitant about implementing the survey such as a period of organisation change, I recommend you still implement the survey. The results will be influenced by the current circumstances and what your people are facing at the time but it will give you great insights.

5. Take action on the results – one of the reasons that many employee surveys lose impact is that the organisation does not take action on the results. Engage your leadership team and senior managers by providing them with survey results for the whole organisation and for their own department. I suggest you accompany the results with a support plan to assist your line managers in facilitating a meeting with their team to review the results and then create an action plan for them to both embed the areas that are working well and prioritise the actions that they will take moving forward. Embedding these action plans into a teams day to day work and reporting on how they move forward will help employees realise that their input is valued and acted upon.

6. Communicate and celebrate success – when you have analysed the results and determined the resultant action plan you will be working on, make sure that you share this with all employees, ensuring that you put into context why you are working on specific areas as a priority. Then as the year progresses, connect the decisions you are making in the business to support the development of your employer brand to the feedback you received from your employees in the survey. Share success stories from different teams where they are moving forward in building a business where your employees are proud to work.

7. Conduct regular pulse checks – your employee survey does not need to be a once a year programme. I recommend that you take regular pulse checks with a short 1-3 question survey which you can target to a specific demographic segment or team in your business which will provide you with a temperature check on the areas you are working on.

THIS WEEK’S EMPLOYER BRAND INSIGHTS

If you currently implement an employee survey to support building your employer brand, review your survey implantation plan against these seven steps. Are there actions you can take to enhance the effectiveness and ownership of the survey in your business?

If you would like to implement and employee survey to support you in diagnosing the strength of your employer brand, you can use these seven steps to support you. If you are not confident you have the capability or capacity to implement the survey, consider asking an Employer Branding consultant to support you.

But remember, do not implement a survey unless you do plan to take action on the results. The most damaging thing for your employer brand would be to engage people and ask them for their input in a survey and then do nothing with the results.

If you are looking for assistance in developing a compelling employer brand, you can  hear me speak on this subject at the forthcoming HR Ireland Conference taking place in Cork on 25 and 26 September 2008 – and if you can not attend the conference, you can contact me at connect(at)oneoceangroup.comif you have a question about how to bring your employer brand to life.

© Krishna De, 2007. All rights reserved. This article is extracted from Krishna’s publication “Bringing Your Employer Brand To Life – A guide to attracting, inspiring and retaining great talent”.