Sales could improve by as much as 3% if employees were more engaged with their work, and businesses should put more focus on monitoring that engagement, new research from Gallup has found.
Qualtrics Asia Pacific and Japan managing director Bill McMurray believes that engaged employees excel in all areas compared to their unengaged counterparts.
“Companies with engaged employees outperform those that don't. Collecting feedback from employees at every stage of their interaction with the business – from onboarding through to exit – can give the organisation insight into how they can improve the employee experience and retain top talent," he says.
Qualtrics believes that in order to form and monitor employee lifecycle feedback, a six touchpoint programme should ideally include feedback in the recruitment, onboarding, surveys, and employee exits. Touchpoint 1: Recruitment Qualtrics believes that employee evaluation should begin during the pre-hiring stage, using it to gain insights that can shape hiring decisions and the recruitment process and increase acceptance rates.
“Organisations should solicit feedback from both successful and unsuccessful candidates to get a broader range of perspectives on the recruitment process," McMurray says.
Touchpoint 2: Onboarding Finding out how new employees rate their early experiences, training and orientation with the organisations can provide insight about employee knowledge and skills - and whether they're right for the job.
“Organisations make a significant investment in new employees. By improving the onboarding process, the ramp time to value can be reduced, thereby accelerating the ROI from the new hire investment," McMurray says.
Touchpoint 3: Employee engagement surveys
The use of engagement surveys can be a key method of discovering what drives real engagement. Opportunities for benchmarking and improvement can be identified using this process.
Touchpoint 4: Engagement pulse surveys These surveys work well with employee engagement surveys, adding a better level of depth into issues that may have been discovered on a time or department level. This survey type can also monitor trends.
“Pulse surveys are most effective when implemented throughout a year to determine the effectiveness of action plans that were developed based on the engagement survey feedback. Smaller samples of employees, that are statistically representative (e.g. 10 to 25 percent), can help to avoid survey fatigue and ensure higher response rates," McMurray says.
Touchpoint 5: Developmental 180 and 360 surveys
It's out with the old performance reviews and in with the new 180/360-degree assessment reviews. These reviews incorporate peer and department feedback to broaden the input and feedback during employee reviews.
“To be effective, organisations should base these assessments on the employee's core competency model and distribute the reports within 24 hours of collecting the data so it's still relevant," McMurray says.
Touchpoint 6: Employee exits When employees leave, Qualtrics believes it's important to find out why. This can facilitate changes that can reduce the expensive turnover process. Adding automated surveys may also help with honest feedback, which is difficult in face-to-face situations.
“Employee engagement is directly linked to improved Customer Experience, which in turn is directly related to increased revenues so it should always be a key focus area for organisations. One of the best ways to run an employee lifecycle program is through a real-time survey platform that is sophisticated, yet easy-to-use. This way it is easy for employees to provide feedback and the organisation can see the feedback in real-time (even before the survey has closed) and they are able to take action quickly on the data being collected," McMurray says.