Are Your Annual Employee Surveys Giving You the True Picture?

10 Mistakes Small Businesses Make That Are Costing Them Productivity

Let’s hit the rewind button and go back 30 years ago to a time when employee turnover was only 4%. Most of the time when an employee left a business three decades ago, it was involuntary.

Now, let’s jump back to today where employee turnover is over 10% and people are leaving businesses more freely. This type of turnover has put a tremendous burden on employers making it harder than ever to manage simple HR tasks, such as payroll, scheduling, and more.

The main culprit for the high turnover? A lack of engagement.

An Honest Look at Employee Engagement

In 2015, Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends report came out and shook the HR industry. The biggest finding was the unimpressive number of engaged employees. Roughly a third of all employees feel engaged in their job, which leaves two thirds on the brink of leaving on any given day.

Do those numbers align with what you’ve found in your annual surveys? Probably not and there’s a reason for that.

The Truth Behind Your Annual Employee Surveys

The truth behind these surveys is that they’re inherently flawed. No matter whether you’re conducting anonymous surveys or you’re meeting one-on-one with your employees, you’re not getting an accurate glimpse into what’s happening in your company in terms of employee engagement.

There are a few reasons for this.

– The time of the year can skew your employee’s responses;

– The time of day can skew your employee’s responses;

– The environment where the survey is given can skew your employee’s responses.

Managers might have an influence in how survey questions are answered. The inherent nature of the job during the holiday season might have an influence on how the questions are answered. This is no fault of your employees but instead a fault in the system.

How to Tell if Your Employees are Engaged

Given this information, it’s safe to assume that only a third of your workforce is engaged, even if your annual surveys tell you otherwise. But one Deloitte survey probably isn’t good enough to make that assumption. You want to see first-hand how engaged your employees are and where specifically you’re lacking engagement.

That’s where technology can come into play.

HR apps today, such as our online scheduling app, can give you a better glimpse into how your employees approach work. By giving your employees the freedom to make changes and manage their employment with your firm, you’re able to do two things:

1. Re-engage your employees by giving them control over their employment with you;
2. Monitor how engaged they are and who is engaged in your business.

Time of year, time of day, and the company they keep have far less of an influence on this collective data giving you a more accurate way to analyze and understand your employee engagement. You can see which branches are retaining employees and compare that to how engaged those employees are with their team. You can see which times of year you’re losing employees and compare that to how engaged they are.
It’s this type of insight that’ll help you make better changes to your overall engagement levels.

Author Profile Jon Forknell is the Vice President and General Manager of Atlas Business Solutions, Inc., a software marketing company specializing in employee scheduling software, including ScheduleBase employee scheduling software, and other business software solutions. In the past, Jon has been recognized by the U.S. Small Business Administration as a SBA Young Entrepreneur of the Year. Atlas Business Solutions was named as one of Software Magazine’s Top 500 Software Companies in 2004 through 2007 and again in 2010, 2013 and 2014.