Call Recording Featured Article

It’s said that happy employees make for happy customers, and, thus, successful companies. And when employees are dissatisfied with their jobs, everybody suffers. Indeed, Gallup suggests that employee disengagement costs American companies $450-550 billion annually.

So it pays for businesses to do what they can to engage employees. Any management article, or just common sense, will tell you that fair compensation, flexibility, a path to promotion, and keeping employees in the loop by providing them with knowledge about company goals and their own performance can help with that. But figuring out what’s most important to your particular employees can be especially helpful as well.

As Avatar Solutions notes in a recent blog, businesses can gain this kind of knowledge via employee surveys. The article also presents three things companies can do to get the most from employee surveys. The trio of suggestions includes making anonymity the first priority, prioritizing opportunities to improve, and linking employee engagement to strategic business outcomes.

Anonymity, Avatar Solutions notes, is a more important consideration today than ever. That’s because the rise of the cloud and self-service administration platforms make it easier for businesses to identify survey respondents. In fact, Avatar Solutions says, identification of this sort is often the default setting on today’s survey solutions. The problem with that, Avatar Solutions suggests, is that employees who are concerned they will be identified will be much less likely to be honest with their feedback.

By prioritizing opportunities to improve, Avatar is referring to the fact that many employee engagement efforts don’t meet their potential because they fail to both show leaders where the organization can improve and prioritize which of those areas should be tackled first.

Of course, linking employee engagement to strategic business outcomes is key to all of this, as the blog discusses.

“For your employee engagement program to support the kind of long-term, sustainable impact you are looking to achieve, you need buy-in from your executive team, and most especially your CEO,” Avatar Solutions says. “Whereas executives may be resistant initially to investing in employee engagement initiatives, connecting engagement with business metrics like revenue and employee retention will get their attention.”