What Is an Employee Survey Action Plan?
An employee engagement survey action plan refers to the practical steps you decide to take following the analysis of survey results. An employee survey action plan shows you value employee feedback and aim to be proactive about improving engagement and experience.
As you might expect, line managers have a huge impact on employee engagement and are, arguably, the key stakeholder group when it comes to taking action. Theirs is an integral role, supporting their teams in understanding the survey data and selecting the right local survey actions.
Steps to Effective Employee Engagement Action Planning
The real and lasting value of an employee survey strategy comes from understanding and acting upon the data that comes from it. Naturally, then, getting the design right and ensuring total alignment with business strategy and goals is imperative.
So, after creating and executing the engagement survey, you need to know how to develop an efficient action plan. Remember – employee experience matters more than ever, so getting this right is crucial. Take a look at our recommended steps below.
1. Understanding (and communicating) the value of engagement
There’s no doubt that improving employee engagement can have a hugely beneficial impact on key business performance outputs. The evidence is overwhelming – the Engage For Success website is a gold mine for this – and it is crucial you help your people (particularly managers) to understand what kind of impact engagement has on things like customer satisfaction, employee retention, performance and absence rates. This empowerment of line managers is key to driving survey actions and buy in at a local level.
2. Explore and understand data at a local level
You’ll need to give your managers access to the local-level data. This is vital in shifting the ownership of action plans to the front line. But you have to make this process easy and intuitive for managers and consider the format of how you present survey data to them, as some will be more comfortable with data and interpretation than others.
We suggest using manager insight reports that make it easy for managers to interpret and act on their local survey data. Such a report helps managers interpret their team’s survey data and identify areas for action. Typically, this might include:
● Response rates for the manager’s direct team
● Engagement index scores
● Survey section scores
● Priority questions for action, based on an assessment of several key criteria
● Questions most above/below the benchmark
● Questions most improved/declined since the last survey
● A comparison to the company overall or other business areas
● An action-planning template.
What you can also do is guide managers on what questions to look at. Our natural inclination is to hone in on the lowest-scoring questions, but it’s unlikely these will have the biggest impact on engagement. So, to ensure that managers can action plan strategically, we help managers by pulling out priority questions/areas for them (based on our analysis, including looking at historic scores and an external benchmark).
3. Identify focus areas
Don’t allow managers to become too narrow in their thinking; it’s important they’re aware of any overall business-level focus areas to inform local-level action planning.
One large leisure organisation we partner with communicates executive-level action areas throughout the business. At a local level, managers are then encouraged to create an action plan based on the local priority questions in their area, but they are also asked to align these to the executive actions, where possible.
By encouraging greater alignment of action plans, you can ensure that people are working towards shared business goals. This may help you to enact larger change and have a more significant impact on improving perceptions of the biggest drivers of engagement for your business.
4. Set SMART goals
Once you’ve identified the areas of the business you need to focus on, it’s time to set objectives that align with addressing these areas. Your goals should be SMART, or specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely, to put it plainly.
By creating clear objectives, you can set out a clear path to success and ensure every team member knows what they are working towards. You can even go one step furthe rand prioritise these goals, monitoring their progress throughout the process.
5. Make use of internal resources
One of the common challenges that managers and teams face once they have identified their key focus areas is deciding what actions to take.
You could choose to create an ‘action toolkit’ which details how action can be taken against any question in your survey. The toolkit is a valuable resource for managers, designed to provide them with a library of useful resources and information to help them understand how they can drive local actions and improve engagement in their area of the business.
By mapping out content such as useful tips, existing internal training, and other resources against each survey question, managers and their teams can really hit the ground running.
Additionally, below, we’ve included a simple model of key principles and stages of action planning. You could provide this to your managers as a framework to refer to.
6. Take an inclusive, team-led approach
An effective employee survey action plan needs to be discussed with all team members. Questions should be encouraged, and roles in your action toolkit should be assigned, ensuring every team member knows how they can contribute effectively and by what date.
Where individuals are involved in determining which actions are achievable and identifying the steps they want to take, they are likely to be far more ‘bought in’ and committed to carrying these out. Remember, you can improve employee engagement through meaningful conversations, so communication is key here.
One retailer we work with does this well, encouraging managers to facilitate team discussions, enabling their teams to work through the data and collaboratively agree on the actions they want to take. Once the team actions have been agreed by everyone, a poster is created which is then signed by each team member as a show of their commitment to the agreed actions and displayed prominently in a shared area.
7. Record and track agreed-on actions
Once focus areas and actions are identified and the roles have been assigned, it is important for managers and their teams to track actions and measure their ongoing progress against these. Your managers can achieve this through the use of action planning templates (issued by the business) or even by using a dedicated action planning tool or portal.
This employee engagement action planning step can be invaluable in creating transparency in action plans and encouraging shared ownership among the team.
8. Monitor results and keep up momentum
Once action areas have been decided, to support momentum and progress against action plans going forward, encourage managers to:
● Agree on ownership of actions and make different team members accountable
● Make actions visible to the whole team
● Monitor progress and identify milestones
● Celebrate and communicate successes as a team!
If a weakness in the employee survey action plan is identified, consider how you can shift the strategy to address this and keep the ball rolling.
Engagement Survey Action Planning Best Practices
Let’s cover some best practice tips for employee engagement survey action planning to ensure you take out your next action plan in style:
● Identify possible challenges the team may have to overcome during the process, and how this can be done
● Prioritise specific goals to solidify the plan of action
● Set milestones to make your SMART goals more manageable
● Follow up on progress and communicate clearly with all team members to ensure everyone is on the right track
● As a manager, set a good example for your employees by following through on the agreed-upon action points
● Gain additional insights with exit interviews to drive future action planning
● Don’t give up – employee engagement survey action planning is a journey, not a one-off task!
Why Is Employee Engagement Action Planning So Important?
Finally, we want to end with why employee engagement action planning is so necessary for your organisation to help you understand why you should take on our step-by-step guide above.
By putting an effective employee survey action plan in place, you can enjoy:
● Elevated engagement
By getting everyone involved in an employee survey action plan, you can show your staff that you value their feedback and actively want to improve the organisation for them, prompting an improvement in engagement and trust. Engaged team members may also enjoy morale and be less likely to quit their jobs
● Increased ROI
With a more engaged team, you may see a more productive team, potentially leading to a higher return on investment.
● Better leadership
Employee survey action planning can prompt stronger leadership, with this process demanding that managers communicate, listen, reflect, and make data-driven decisions based on their team’s requirements. By encouraging accountability, managers can act in accordance with the organisation and employees’ best interests.
● More positive workplace culture
Listening and responding to employee feedback and addressing this in an engagement survey action plan can foster a more positive organisational culture. It can encourage feelings of fairness and respect amongst employees and management teams.
● More progress
An employee engagement survey action plan includes key goals and milestones, helping you understand if your organisation is moving in the right direction. With clear guidelines and roles to work towards the objectives, you can make more progress than you would have done otherwise.
Have a Question About Employee Engagement Action Planning?
It pays to look before you leap. Stuff like leadership development, team effectiveness training, and behavioural values framework design often doesn’t come cheap. So, surely you want to know you are investing in the right things, the things that are crucial to providing the very best employee experience and are pivotal to achieving your business strategy. Right?
By running a comprehensive diagnostic exercise (like an employee engagement survey) first, you can plan with that confidence. It provides a solid foundation from which to launch your people roadmap and move your organisation forward.
Remember –post-survey action planning is a continuous process. If you need help constructing a survey or with employee engagement action planning, please don’t hesitate to contact us or check out our full stack of handy resources. Our team certainly know a thing or two about making an action plan for engagement surveys and will be more than happy to offer assistance.
