[Mark Maltby]

Good Morning,

I have just returned from a lean seminar focused on Employee Engagement. I was just wondering if anyone has any experience in conduction a Gallup Employee Engagement Survey? How did you do it and were the results what you expected?


Many Thanks

Mark

[Amy Brunsdon]

Hi @Mark Maltby

Great question, employee engagement is a really interesting topic.

I wanted to share this thread on the Network about employee engagement which has had lots of replies see here. My colleague Kirsty has shared some fantastic insights from her time working on engagment at Mars using Gallup. @David Jason Muller has also shared his experiences of employee engagement at Lush in this thread. Many others have shared their experiences. So hopefully you'll find this thread useless as a first step.

I will also recah out to a a few community members and encourage others to share their expeirnces.

Thansk

Amy

[Viv Dennis]

Hi @Mark Maltby

We have recently ran an employee engagement survey on site and our results were relatively ok.
The feedback to our employees will be:
We are great at:

Talking to you about developing your role 55% of you agreed and 13.5% strongly agreed

Ensuring that you know what is expected of you at work 66% agreed and 18.5% strongly agreed

We have someone we can turn to for help and advice when we have a problem 53% agreed and 19.7% strongly agreed. Comments such as ‘plenty of good people here’

We also recognise where we can improve on areas such as:

Share knowledge isn’t great – particularly across teams / sites / depts and functions.

Performance not recognised - Especially when we give positive and constructive feedback to help you become better at your job.

We then plan to put together a site action plan with a top three.

Is that okay?

Thanks

Viv

[Mike Newman]

Hi @Mark Maltby.

I have not used Gallup in the past, but have been involved with a number of other similar approaches. A few pointers that you may wish to consider:

- What is the purpose of the survey? What do you want to achieve from it? Why are you doing this now?
- Is this fully supported by the board, not just as a one-off activity, but as a business tool for future improvement? If it is seen as an HR activity rather than a Company activity, it is highly likely to skew the data
- Ensure that there is clear anonymity to gain greatest buy-in; I have experienced board members wanting to drill down in to the demographic data to pin-point individual comments (very destructive)
- Where these have worked well, there has normally been a senior manager attending briefing meetings to set the scene and explain why this is happening
- Allow time away from the workplace to complete the survey otherwise it will be rushed
- Remember, in most cases, the answers you receive will be individual's perceptions which are their realities. Analyse the answers, but do not take it personally. Very often the answers given need to be further understood
- Use the output data to work on the top 2 or 3 issues identified. If you try to do more, be aware that you may spread yourselves too thin and actually not solve anything to anyone's satisfaction
- Provide rapid results and feedback. eg. 'You Said.......We will do/have done'
- If there are some quick wins, go for them to show that you have actually listened
- Keep the feedback live; do not wait until the next survey to remind the team what you have done
- If repeating the survey in the future, ensure that you have actually done something with the data otherwise the usual question of 'Do you believe anything will happen following this survey?' will become a self-fulfilling prophecy
- If you can involve the employees in devising the solutions you will have a greater opportunity of making them stick
- Use the data as a benchmark for future surveys; decide on the frequency. From experience, 18 - 24 months is ample as it actually allows you time to deal with the feedback and continue to run the business

Hope that helps with a few pointers from experience.

Mike.

[Jane High]

Hi @Mark Maltby

we run this every year and give feedback on it either just before or post Xmas - we also do year on year trends when giving feedback

[James Ross-Smith]

Hi @Mark Maltby,

I have just finished running the Gallup Engagement Survey here. I chose Gallup on the back of having some great results across the company with their Strengths Finder tool, which I can't recommend highly enough.


The Engagement survey questions themselves are well researched and I think very useful for hi-lighting areas of strengths and areas for improvement.

The results can be broken down by team, so you can see if a particular manager needs some help finding ways to encourage their team or in tying what their team to do into a bigger picture. However if the team is smaller than four you don't get the breakdown making it less directly actionable.

We also intend to use it as a benchmark to see if interventions we are running are having a positive effect on our teams. Overall I think it is an excellent tool if the organisation is genuinely interested in improving staff engagement.

We have also put it in a wider engagement framework and we ran it in parallel with a couple of other things that are worth looking at:

Psychological Safety - which is a poor name, but basically helps to predict high and low performing teams and is based on research on what made the difference between the best and worst teams in the manufacturing and healthcare sectors. It has recently got a lot of press as Google have adopted it as one of the key cornerstones of their HR approach. We are measuring this within teams and between teams and this gives you a layer of insight you can't get from the Gallup survey.


Autonomy Supportive Management Style - this is basically a measure of whether managers are attempting to manage their staff in an autonomous way (which has a proven link to higher job satisfaction, commitment, knowledge sharing and lower turnover) as opposed to a controlled way (with links to increased turnover and emotional exhaustion).


Finally it might be worth checking out WeThrive, I am just at the finishing stages of an MSC in this area and so wanted to run very specific surveys, but if I hadn't been so geeky I think we would have used this service which runs a bank of science backed surveys and then offers very specific action steps to help managers to improve. I was very impressed with it and as a one stop shop I think it would be hard to beat.

[Viv Dennis]

Hi James this is useful info.

[James Ross-Smith]

Thanks Viv. If you need any more info on any of the non Gallup stuff then please let me know.

[Viv Dennis]

@James Ross-Smith Thanks I'm actually interested in your measurement of managers and Psychological Safety.
Autonomy Supportive Management Style - this is basically a measure of whether managers are attempting to manage their staff in an autonomous way (which has a proven link to higher job satisfaction, commitment, knowledge sharing and lower turnover) as opposed to a controlled way (with links to increased turnover and emotional exhaustion).
Viv

[James Ross-Smith]

@Viv Dennis if you would like to have a chat about this I would be more than happy to talk about it and point you in the direction of some research.