Are you asking the right questions?

Now is that time of year where many organizations invest time and resources to measuring their employee’s engagement.  Clearly employee engagement is critical to sustained, top-tier results, but what engages people and how best to engage them is changing rapidly. What doesn’t change as rapidly are the survey questions developed to determine engagement and the post survey process for assessing progress throughout the year.

So are we asking the right questions to even gauge engagement? Then are we, as an organization, providing the focus, resources, and support required to enhance and cultivate top-tier engagement that leads to top-tier performance?  Often times, components of what we measured in the past for engagement such competitive benefits packages, comparable pay and compensation, and other internal policy and procedures, etc are important to measure and understand but tend to be lagging indicators. They tend to have marginal impact on true engagement and we have never come across survey results in over 20 years that say our organization has too rich of a benefit package, pays too well, and provides way too much vacation and leave time!

Before investing in your employee engagement survey process this year take a few minutes to redefine what future, top-tier employee engagement looks like throughout the organization.  Once success is defined, reimagine your employee engagement strategy going forward.  Your strategy should include thought and discussion on what engages your employees and how it has changed in your industry and organization over time.  Based on that, ask the questions that will provide insight and feedback on the current state with a focus to the future. Set your future engagement factor bar higher, don’t settle for just a reflection on how well you are doing today. That leads to settling for and cultivating more of the same.

Does your engagement survey questions provide insight and feedback in these critical engagement factor areas?

·       Creating a unique employee experience for each individual

·       Evolving to an employee-led, leader supported performance model

·       Knowledge shared and feedback received in near real time

·       A shared purpose throughout the organization that inspires performance

·       A culture that enables the right behaviors that lead to the right results and stands on values and principles

·       A climate that focuses more on change leadership than on change management

·       Leadership that inspires, facilitates, and develops not directs, controls, and manages.

In addition to considering these future focused engagement survey factors, are the recommendations, actions, and results of the annual feedback process employee-led, supported by leadership, and enabled by the organization, not driven by management directive? And is progress on these employee-led actions and recommendations followed up on during the year with random rapid pulse surveys to gauge near term progress so success can be leveraged and adjustments can be made, if necessary, prior to another beginning of year engagement survey coming around again?

Employee engagement is changing. To make 2017 your year for enhanced employee engagement, start and end by asking the right questions!

Cornerstone Learning is a performance and leadership consulting organization that has worked with clients all over the world. Our focus is working with individuals and organizations to create performance solutions that deliver top-tier results by inspiring, enabling, and developing employee-led, leader supported, and organization enabled performance. We are able to successfully deliver this through multiple products and services such as employee surveys, online training, performance assessments, and performance coaching. The goal at Cornerstone Learning is to assist our clients in developing a dynamic and customized blue print to deliver role model organizational and personal performance.