Wie bringen Sie Mitarbeiterbefragungen mit den Zielen und Werten Ihres Unternehmens in Einklang?

The purpose of an employee engagement survey should not really be what the organisation wants or needs, but rather what your people do. This means questions should be designed to get to the truth of how people feel working for you, rather than trying to validate an opinion that benefits the company

Borrowing some concepts from the UX and Product Management disciplines, employee voice surveys can be considered a kind of User Research. Users (employees, in this case) don't necessarily know the solution to their problems, but they do have a direct experience of the pain. As such, a lot of the focus needs to be on listening to people describing their usual behaviors, and the pain points that they experience on these, so that we can have a better understanding of the problem we're trying to solve. It also helps us validate a lot of the preconceived notions we had about employees' intentions, motivations, and sentiments.

Think about what questions you are asking carefully. For example, asking most employees if they think they are paid fairly will result in a negative response. If you believe your pay is fair and benchmarked and wouldn’t be prepared to change it, don’t ask a question like “how fair do you consider your pay” as you will put yourself into a position where you can’t act on feedback and that may harm engagement.

Whichever tool or system you use to administer your survey, be sure the questions are phrased in a way that will align to your company culture for a few years. You want to avoid changing the questions every year, otherwise you'll have no way to benchmark change or improvements year over year for that specific topic. For example, I've worked to add additional survey dimensions that focused on DEI. These questions asked specifically about being treated fairly and if race or gender impacted the employee's treatment at work. Standardizing the question allowed us to have a benchmark answer year one, and then the following year, be able to assess if more or fewer employees had negative treatment due to their race or gender.

Once you have your survey content nailed down, have a professional writer or editor look it over, and be open to their suggestions. You want to make sure your questions make sense. If your question can be interpreted in different ways, the data you gather will be misleading. Make sure your questions are clear and direct, and that you're providing enough applicable response options (if the questions are multiple choice), or at least don't prevent people from skipping questions. It's frustrating to be required to answer a multiple choice survey question in order to complete the survey, and not have a single option that represents your actual answer. Again, what you end up with is misleading data.

One thing I've found helpful is make sure you engage leadership at all levels with delivering and action planning the survey results. Employee voice surveys aren't solely an "HR thing" and shouldn't be viewed as only Human Resources responsibility to "fix" the questions that result as unfavorable by employees. Executive leaders to middle managers should partner in taking ownership of the results that THIER employees have given feedback on!

Employee voice surveys are conversations. And one of the components that define a conversation, is an interactive cadence. If you are the only voice, and you only ask occasionally, when you want to know something, this is one-sided and thus not as helpful. You need to build a routine of asking questions, and a routine of following up on the answers, with acknowledgment, and with action. Voice surveys are just one of the many instances of conversation with your employee, and you need to understand the whole for better impact. For example, managers need to be equipped with insight from employee voice surveys so that they can weave a consistent and coherent message in their own conversations with their team members.

Nothing boosts employee engagement quicker than asking your people what they need. Nothing will kill it quicker than not acting on what was said. While it may not always be possible to act on employee feedback, it’s important that people are told quickly that they’ve been listened to and regularly kept up to date with any actions related to the survey.

Communicating your expectations, and especially your intentions, sets the framework for the interaction with your employees. Your communication about the survey sets the tone for the conversation, and it needs to mirror the tone you expect to receive in the responses. Providing acknowledgment to participants is essential to continuing to receive honest, spontaneous feedback. But is not enough: if no action at all is taken, the participation will dwindle and the engagement will drop.

Following up and reporting on results can't just be a sprint which fizzles out later in the year. Leaders should follow up quarterly and communicate steps taken in the last quarter to address opportunities and one of two commitments for the following quarter.