The Workplace Coach

Many organisations conduct annual employee engagement surveys to track the level of ‘engagement’ in the workforce.  The metrics will be based on a range of survey questions asking how people feel about their supervisor, their career development prospects, the recognition they get, the organisational mission, vision and values, and the performance of the executive team.  There will be some cultural, communications and consultation questions, plus a few topical questions relating to issues of immediate interest (eg. COVID response and return to the office). In theory, most of the questions will be repeated every year to allow for tracking of trends over time. 

Survey questions will generally be in the form of a statement and respondents are asked to provide a response on a likert scale (1-5) indicating their level of agreement with the statement.  For example, the statement might be “My manager supports my ongoing career development” and the response will be anywhere between 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 5 (Strongly Agree). The survey may also include a couple of free text questions, and while these are harder to track year on year they do provide an opportunity for narrative.  These might be questions like “What do you like best about working at XYZ?” or “If you could change one thing at XYZ what would it be?”

Organisationally we are looking for improvement in the overall “engagement score”, and grouping of the questions (Leadership, Communication, Career Development etc) will allow for some deeper analysis of the issues.  The score is not the only measure of engagement though, completion rates also form part of the picture. We want high completion rates AND improvement against the metrics for a good measure of employee engagement.

So now you’ve conducted your survey.  You have identified some areas that your people are really happy about and some other areas that require some attention.  You have an overall score for your employee engagement, and it will be higher or lower than the year before, and you’ve also identified a few areas where some work needs to be done.

What are the most common areas for improvement that pop up in engagement surveys? Often it’s trust in leadership, the relationship with the supervisor, the lack of development opportunities and poor organisational communication. So what is to be done?

The usual organisational response then is to charge the HR people with developing policy, procedures or training solutions to address each of the issues.  The real problem however is that it is unlikely that a policy, procedure or training program is going to fix these things. The reality is that you don’t have an employee engagement issue… you have a manager capability issue.

According to Mark Marone, PHD and Director of Research and thought leadership for Dale Carnegie and Associates, the three biggest factors affecting employee engagement are: Trust in Leadership, Relationship with Manager, and Pride in Organisation.  The easiest of these to influence is the employee’s relationship with their manager.  The quickest and most effective way to develop highly effective people managers in your organisation is for them to work directly with a people and performance coach.

If you want to find out more about our coaching packages and how they will help your managers become more effective in their roles then drop us a line at info@theworkplacecoach.com.au .

The Workplace Coach