A discussion has been taking place on Twitter among the crowd over the past day about employee surveys. We’re going to create an info sheet based on your feedback and top tips, but there is one area of debate that is really dividing the crowd. Incentives.
So, with that in mind we’re running a short poll to discover how many people incentivise their employee surveys to encourage people to complete them. We ideally mean your main employee survey, but if you only run smaller ones, do answer the question. If you don’t have a survey, please answer ‘not applicable’.
Discussions on Twitter have revealed various incentives, mainly involving sweet treats, and we’re curious to know whether you incentivise or not. If you have additional feedback, do comment below or tweet us @theICcrowd. Thank you:
Update: Access the information sheet
[poll id=”2″]
Al Shaw
Jan 15, 2013 -
In the past I’ve been part of teams that have publicly released the feedback rates for the business units, which implicitly creates some competition. And I remember some seriously attention grabbing poster stuff too.
And here are some views on how to handle employee surveys generally.
In my experience the conventional approach of the employees giving their feedback, then top leaders making commitments to understand then act on it all through a company action plan doesn’t work. I’ve never seen it work. How can a CEO meet the needs expressed in a survey by thousands of individual people? It’s like trying to meaningfully summarise the weather in Europe; there are too many micro issues underneath it all.
When I was with AXA, I noticed some managers had really nailed how to handle this and ten years later the most common elements still form the blueprint for me of how to handle them:
1. drill down the data to as local (while still protecting anonymity) a level as possible – it will be more relevant and you can then hold line managers accountable for action and improvement – good managers will welcome that
2. when they receive their data, those managers present the highlights to their teams, promising action
3. they convene a team, consisting of people from within the department, to work through what their colleagues want to be improved – even better if they are visible when they meet
4. they empower those people to both understand the issues and come up with the solutions, within what they can directly control (e.g. pay rises may be off limits), but with the manager’s visible support
5. they collectively and regularly update their colleagues on what’s changing in response to their feedback
So the process is local, not macro, unless obvious macro themes emerge. Even better if the senior leaders can show that they themselves are talking about how they as a team can improve their own ‘local’ working environment. The employees are empowered to act on where they would like to see improvements. In these AXA customer service teams this was often very, very local issues like new blinds to stop the sun shining in their eyes, or a third floor coffee machine because the walk down to the lower-ground was using up their ten minute break – no macro level action plan would ever identify and act on needs like those. Fundamentally these managers used the survey as a device for talking to their teams about what could be better and empowering them to act on it. It was no surprise that the productivity measures for their teams improved, as well as their survey scores.