More About Employee Survey Action Planning

When preparing your Action Plan(s), you need to decide the following for each action item you select:

Decide on the steps to take, target dates and metrics for determining success.
Identify potential team members who could help with the development and implementation of your action plan.
Obtain buy-in from other key stakeholders.
Manage employee expectations by setting boundaries on what can and cannot be done at your organization or within your department, site or function unit - say "no" when necessary but provide a reasonable rationale for the negative response.
Share your Action Plan with all employees at your organization or within your department, site or functional unit.
Describe why and how the solutions should improve the work environment.
Model the behavior you are working to improve.

Tips for Successful Action Planning

Action Planning refers to the steps, tasks and processes involved in implementing sustained change at an organization based on employee survey results and needs to be the follow-up step after (1) an employee survey has been conducted at an organization and (2) the employee survey data has been collected, analyzed and summarized.To ensure successful Action Planning, you should :

Identify the key issues at your organization that need attention and set goals to address these issues -
What are the potential causes of the problems at your organization?
What are your organization's key opportunities for improvement?
What changes can you implement immediately?
What are your medium- and longer-term goals?

Establish a series of individual action items -
What specific action steps will you put in place to achieve each of your goals?
What is your plan of action?

Communicate the plan to your employees -
How will you let employees know what your plan is and that the plan came about after listening to their input?

Implement the Action Plan and institute regular follow ups -
How will you put your plan in place? How will you know if it is effective?

While the planning stage is important, the real key to make action planning successful is ACTION. The implementation of Action Plans is critical if you want to see improvements in overall results at your organization. Action Planning should be conducted in a timely manner. On the one hand, you should not react so quickly when you get your employee survey results that you cannot give careful consideration to the planning process but, at the same time, you need to avoid taking so much time as to lose momentum. It is essential to ensure that your employees do not believe that their participation in the survey process was in vain. Furthermore, the best organizations communicate their progress and successes to all employees at every step of the process. Not only are Action Plans implemented but employees also know that the actions taken link directly back to the results of the employee survey. This approach helps to ensure that employees clearly recognize the value of participating in an employee survey.

Establishing a Target for Overall Job Satisfaction

One of the key goals of any action plan should be to increase overall job satisfaction, since the impact of higher job satisfaction extends beyond employee attitudes to affect such factors as lower employee turnover, greater operational efficiency, higher customer satisfaction and even improved financial performance.

Projecting the impact of your Action Plan(s) on overall job satisfaction needs careful consideration. Setting too low a target may diminish the potential returns, while an unrealistically high goal can lack credibility and affect confidence in the survey process. Based on Insightlink's experience, overall job satisfaction increases an average of 7 percentage points between surveys. This result can be used as the basis for establishing your own anticipated increase.

Goal Setting Prioritization

Each goal set should be analyzed via S.M.A.R.T. before it can be incorporated into an Action Plan:

SPECIFIC - For each goal you set, you need to answer: Who? What? Where? When? Which? Why?

MEASURABLE - You must set concrete criteria for measuring your progress toward the attainment of each goal.

ATTAINABLE/AGREED-UPON - You are unlikely to meet goals that are too far out of your reach but, at the same time, a goal needs to stretch you and your site so you feel you are committed to achieving it.

REALISTIC - All goals must represent an objective toward which you (and your organization) are both willing and able to achieve.

TIME DEFINED - All goals must be linked to a specific time frame.

The Steps to Successful Action Planning

As summarized in the Workbook, the key steps to take following any employee survey are to:
Review your Insightlink 4Cs survey results yourself and with senior management in order to understand the main themes from your employee survey, identify the key strengths of your organization and the primary opportunities for improvement.

Share a summary of the results with your employees, both to give them a "heads up" that their voices have been heard and to prepare them for the action planning to follow. Since all employees should attend an Employee Survey Feedback Session, make sure that you hold enough sessions to accommodate for different schedules, locations, etc.
Name a coordinator (usually someone in HR) who is responsible for the Action Planning process, in addition to naming sponsors and/or Task Forces for each of the major issues addressed in your Insightlink 4Cs report.

Set clear and specific goals for improvement at your organization. Depending on the size of your organization, you may need to set goals both at the corporate level as well as at individual department, site or functional unit level.

Create an effective and workable Action Plan to achieve those goals, including establishing a concrete time frame for implementation. If your organization is large enough, your organization should develop both a Corporate plan and separate department/site/functional unit plans.
Communicate the applicable Action Plans to your employees, which not only prepares them for the changes that will be taking place but also establishes accountability within the Action Planning process.

Monitor and measure progress at achieving the goals in the Action Plans on a regular basis and celebrate successes as they occur.

Conduct regular follow-up employee surveys in order to evaluate the overall success of your Action Plans and to establish additional opportunities for improvement.

4Cs Survey Feedback and Action Planning Workbook

Both extensive research and Insightlink's own experience with clients have demonstrated that, after an employee survey has been conducted, employees are much more interested in seeing action taken than they are in seeing the results of the employee survey. In fact, employee surveys have little or no value if nothing is done to make improvements at the organization. This is why successful action planning is a critical component of successful employee surveys. Insightlink is committed to providing our clients with the tools and help they need to create effective Action Plans that are designed for their organizations specifically. For this reason, we are pleased to announce the publication of the Insightlink 4Cs Survey Feedback and Action Planning Workbook.