What to work on after an employee loyalty survey

Article about figuring out what areas to work on after an employee loyalty survey has been conducted.

5 Common Questions-How do I know what areas to work on?

Friday, April 24, 2009 by Chris Woolard

The next question I want to cover is figuring out what areas to work on after an employee loyalty survey has been conducted.One of the biggest mistakes I see companies make is they only work on the lowest rated questions. The problem with this is the employees may not care if you improve the areas they rated the lowest. No matter how much the organization improves those three areas, it will not have any impact on changing employee behavior and ultimately have no impact on the organization. There are a number of methods to determine which questions matter the most to the employees. You can ask a simple importance question along with the standard rating questions, a chip-allocation series can be used, and there are statistical techniques that can be used to derive importance. Each of these methods has their advantages and disadvantages. The point is if you use some sort of importance/impact measure and combine that with performance ratings, now priorities can be determined by seeing the entire picture and not just one piece. Often an area for improvement might be an area that is fairly positive but because it matters so much to the employees, even a small improvement in scores will have a large impact on employee morale. Another problem with acting on data is figuring out what specific change needs to be made. No survey is going to give you the silver bullet in determining the specific change that needs to happen. All good surveys will give you guidance though; perhaps things like development for the long-term, fairness of evaluations, etc. It is often valuable to read through the comments as these will help give you the specific "thing" that needs changed. Comments can help provide meat around the quantitative questions asked in a survey..

http://blog.walkerinfo.com/blog/employee-engagement/0/0/5-common-questions-how-do-i-know-what-areas-to-work-on