Bob Kelleher, Insights, Northeast Human Resource Association, Winter 2011, pgs. 18-20. Bob Kelleher, speaker, consultant, CEO of The Employee Engagement Group and author of, Louder Than Words- 10 Practical Employee Engagement Steps That Drive Results shares his viewpoint for conducting an employee engagement survey.
Instead of striving for employee satisfaction, Kelleher believes our goal should be employee engagement. Kelleher defines engagement as, the unlocking of your employee potential to drive high performance. Employee satisfaction will be a bi product of employee engagement will foster but it should not be your organization’s focus. An employee engagement survey measures engagement-not satisfaction. Kelleher shares his top lessons learned from his 25 years experience with HR, operations, organizational development and employee engagement.
- Do not conduct a survey unless you are convinced your leadership team is committed to listengin and acting on feedback.
- Partner with a consulting firm
- Set the stage
- Have a communication plan
- Establish a cross sectional committee to review overall company results and to make recommendation to management
- At a micro level, establish a cross sectional sub-committee to review loacl results (departmental, business unit, etc) and appoint local senior champions
- Have your local commitees adopt a common action plan template and consider posting all plans on your intranet to encorage the sharing of best practices, collaboration and consistency
- Keep it simple and execute flawlessly
- Plan for follow up feedback mechanism
- Do not commit to another survey for 18 to 24 months
- Invest less in your technology and more on post survey results
