Are your employees happy?

Do they enjoy the work they are doing?

These types of questions may appear simplistic at first, but reflect a trend in workplaces all around the world, that are finally putting employee satisfaction at the top of their agenda. Employee happiness and engagement are becoming increasingly recognised as the catalysts for long-term business success.

High staff turnover rates, low employee engagement, and disgruntled team members create a recipe for disaster. To overcome this, businesses must have the well-being of their employees engrained into every aspect of their business, otherwise risk becoming outdated and even extinct organisations. The workplace battle for top talent means businesses need to become employee centric, and create meaningful experiences that far exceed employee expectations.

So, what can businesses do to improve employee engagement?

What is employee engagement?

Firstly, it’s important to actually define what we mean by employee engagement. Employee engagement can be largely defined as creating an environment that fosters employees to become more:

  • Committed
  • Proud
  • Connected with the organisation
  • Energised and focussed
  • Caring and proactive in their work

Here at Primary Colours Surveys, we believe in something called the Head, Heart and Hands model of engagement. An engaged employee will invest more of themselves into their work and the organisation; they will give more of their head (intellectual buy-in), heart (emotional buy-in) and hands (motivation and behavioural effort).

Combined, these attributes create workforces that can achieve more and catapult businesses into new opportunities.

What creates satisfied and engaged employees?

It’s not enough just recognising the importance of employee satisfaction, businesses must also take action. Understanding what employees want from their workplace means businesses can ensure they deliver it and improve employee engagement.

The first step in creating a happy and engaged workplace, is the need to adopt staff surveys and employee engagement questionnaires as regular business processes. Focusing on interpreting this data to help make better employee decisions means businesses aren’t guessing what employees want, instead, they are using a clear process to analyse the specific circumstances affecting everyone.

Delving into the elements of working life which drive engagement in employees means businesses can be quick to react and ensure that frustrations do not grow and worsen over time.

At Primary Colours Surveys, we use external benchmarks to help create expectations and an understanding of how engaged a business’s workforce truly is compared to other similar companies. This allows our clients to set realistic targets for improvement.

The image below provides insights into what drives engagement in the workplace. This is a model we’ve created that illustrates the core factors that will influence how engaged your employees are. From this, we can create engagement surveys and questionnaires that are designed to understand how each individual is feeling about these different aspects of working life. By understanding the key areas to improve, businesses can create more engaged workplaces in the most effective manner.

How to measure employee engagement

Managers and executives may think they can “spot” disengaged employees, but this simply isn’t a sustainable and productive method to go by. Employees can mask their true feelings and businesses may never see the employee’s true potential due to an environment that may not let them flourish.

This is why measuring employee engagement must be approached from a systematic and process orientated way.

Engagement surveys

Engagement surveys will reveal key insights into how employees are feeling about a wide range of aspects of working life. Here at Primary Colours Surveys, we can create engagement surveys that can be tailored to your specific business.

We also help you to develop action plans based on the results. This ensures engagement surveys lead to change and improvements in the workplace.

Pulse Surveys

Pulse surveys are a great addition to understanding levels of satisfaction and engagement in real-time. These surveys are designed to offer quick insights over time, to help reflect the nature of engagement and how it changes on daily basis. Surveying staff once a year is likely to lead to big gaps in potential understanding, so Pulse Surveys help overcome this with more regular feedback.

Pulse surveys help to create a more continual communication mechanism between employees and management. This ensures both sides have the opportunity to contribute feelings and insights to help yield more meaningful results.

Qualitative research

Businesses can often ignore the importance of qualitative data in their efforts to learn more about employee satisfaction and engagement. Taking the time to listen to more qualitative insights and personal accounts of different aspects of working life, will mean businesses have even more actionable insights to utilise.

Qualitative research is perfectly positioned to help collect rich data which can provide further detail and answers to questions that the numerical data create.

One-on-one interviews

A one on one discussion about how employees are feeling helps provide quick and actionable insights. This is a great way to interpret emotion and feelings, as well as providing employees a chance to communicate what they want to.

Often, employees may feel like they can’t share specific details, which is why effective employee engagement strategies will include anonymous qualitative feedback as well.

Exit interviews

Scheduling in time and learning why someone has chosen to leave your business is a vital process for improving in the future. If multiple employees start to describe the same reasons, it can become a clear signal to the business that it needs to address that specific issue as soon as possible.

Exit interviews aren’t about being defensive, instead, trying to gather as much understanding about what that employee felt towards the business and workplace.

Getting on top of employee satisfaction with Primary Colours Surveys

The desire to become more employee centric and increase employee engagement will help businesses grow and succeed in the future. By using the methods discussed in this article, businesses can identify underlying themes and issues that are negatively impacting employee engagement and look to resolve them. They can also identify things that are positively impacting engagement and double down on these to continue to build happy and productive workplaces.

Here at Primary Colours Surveys, we pride ourselves on helping businesses get the most out of their employees. We can help you identify, track and manage the key factors that have an influence on employee engagement.

We provide 3 levels of service for staff surveys, starting with a fully customised survey with a scoping and design meeting and providing project management support and advice throughout. For clients looking for a low-cost solution, we provide the Primary Colours® Core Employee Engagement Survey.

Get in touch today to learn more.