To keep employees' unhappiness from reaching a tipping point, companies are turning to more frequent surveys to gauge the mood of their staffers, thanks to a slew of new survey and collaboration tools that make pulse-taking easier.
It's hard to blame employees for a little work apathy in the summer months when warm weather and vacations beckon. But a recent Gallup poll reveals that employee disengagement is pervasive year-round.
Nearly three-quarters (71%) of millennial workers say they are either not engaged or "actively disengaged" at work, meaning they may be unproductive or spreading their negativity to their co-workers, according to the August 2016 poll. The overall average for U.S. employee engagement — the extent to which employees are committed to their organization — sat at 32.6% in June and has hovered between 31% and 33% since 2014.
Here's where technology steps in. To keep employees' unhappiness from reaching a tipping point, companies are turning to more frequent surveys to gauge the mood of their staffers, thanks to a slew of new survey and collaboration tools that make pulse-taking easier.
Moreover, in an effort to keep people motivated, employers are also providing ongoing performance feedback to employees, especially their newest hires, who have grown up with tools that foster social collaboration and expect that capability in the workplace.
"If I can push out [a survey] to my employees on their mobile device and have them respond, it shows that I care about them," says Jeff Corbin, CEO of Apprise Mobile, a communication platform that brings surveys to employees.
"The employee is more engaged, and the employer can react instantly to the feedback."
But even though constant opinion-sharing and instant digital gratification are now the norm, is it possible that frequent surveys and constant feedback could burn people out, especially if the feedback doesn't appear to lead to any change? Will it further erode in-person dialogue between employees and management?
"Measurement without action is pointless," says Lisa Rowan, an analyst at IDC. "What do you do with [survey data] and all this sentiment?" The survey app market is only about 18 months old, she adds, and the effectiveness of the apps is still unknown.
Many IT and engagement leaders have found success in employee surveys, especially when they're combined with other feedback tools. Here's a look at their experiences, along with tips for surveying employees for maximum results without turning them off.
1. Make it frequent and bite-size
"Feedback, to be best, is in real time, continuous and bite-size — and therefore most actionable," says Andrew X. Wilson, CIO at global consulting and technology firm Accenture. "They need to know in real time how they're doing."
Accenture wants its employees' development curves to be as agile as the projects they work on, so the firm provides its 336,000 global staffers with regular feedback on their work through mobile apps and collaboration tools — part of a revamp of the firm's performance review program, completed in September 2015, that focuses on real-time, frequent and forward-looking coaching discussions.
Accenture has a mobile app called People that lets managers swipe through photos of employees and offer instant feedback to those who have just done something noteworthy.
"If somebody impresses me, I can find them [on the app] and provide feedback," Wilson says. "They see it, their career counselor sees it, and it builds up as a body of feedback through the year." The app is particularly helpful because Accenture deploys resources on a day-by-day, sometimes hour-by-hour, basis as employees move between clients and projects, he adds. The potential for receiving feedback is much broader, anecdotal and more specific than in the past.
"I don't have to sit down and remember who I worked with over the course of the year," Wilson says.
The firm also introduced a tool for measuring team engagement this year. Using the format of Gallup's Q12 Employee Engagement Survey, the tool allows teams to give leadership real-time feedback on how the team is doing. Both Accenture tools allow employees to give feedback to anyone at any time, whether it's a team member, a peer or management.
"We can get real-time reaction from the team, and it speeds up the efficiency of teamwork," Wilson says.
2. Turn feedback into timely action
Surveys often uncover important issues that employees don't want to talk about in person. At Alliance Data, an online employee survey revealed that 17% of workers viewed the company's training practices as unfavorable and 15% remained neutral on the subject.
"I see training as one of the largest unfavorable results [in the survey], yet in routine conversations with associates it's rarely ever brought up," says Mike Rosello, senior vice president and CIO.
Alliance Data, which also deploys a seven-person employee engagement team each month to meet with and gather feedback from workers, followed up with staff on the training issue and discovered that the real problem was finding time for training, especially the courses that require travel. The feedback prompted the company to add more on-site training and make classes larger to accommodate more people.
"The lesson here is there are things that are taken for granted and overlooked, yet they are table stakes of what associates are looking for," Rosello says.
3. Use surveys for organizational change
Pitney Bowes used collaboration tools and surveys and embraced feedback throughout its digital transformation, which began two years ago. Feedback channels gave employees a voice in the process and a visible career path.
"We first had to understand where employees were in terms of technical skills and training," says James Fairweather, senior vice president of innovation. He distributed the company's technology strategy to the organization and solicited feedback using Confluence, a team collaboration tool that allows a more organized flow of ideas than traditional email. His team then held a series of small forums with employees and leaders to determine what skill sets needed to be developed within the organization.
Fairweather's innovation team then developed a unique, yearlong training program. Rather than give employees a set of tasks to complete, they had team leaders hold a series of monthly meetings covering one of 10 identified training areas.
"Our goal was moving them from one set of skills to the new set of skills — and to enhance their careers," Fairweather says. "We surveyed them at the end to ask how it helped to improve understanding of the company, and we got really phenomenal feedback. They felt like they were connected to one company, that they were integrated into the process, and that the company had invested in them."
Fairweather also emphasizes the importance of face-to-face feedback in addition to automated surveys. "Face-to-face interaction develops an empathy that we have found to be invaluable — hearing how the words are said, as well as what is written," he says. "You need both of these to make good decisions."
4. Know your staff's survey threshold
Many mobile survey developers say employers can use their apps to take the pulse of their staffs weekly or even daily. Corbin, of Apprise, has a more conservative view, suggesting that mobile surveys are most effective on a quarterly basis.
At Pitney-Bowes, global employees receive more than a half-dozen surveys a year, but leaders are mindful of the burden and collaborate to limit the number of surveys. There's no clear answer as to how much survey-taking is too much, but organizations that had an ongoing process of continual feedback report 90% engagement satisfaction, according to a study by employee engagement consulting firm Smith & Henderson. Some 63% of employees who took surveys more than once a year, but not continually, say they are satisfied, and 59% of employees who were surveyed once a year report being satisfied with their engagement at work.
Companies must guard against "surveying out" employees, the report concludes. If employers ask for feedback too often and don't have sufficient time between surveys to act on it, then the feedback is ineffective. A prepared online survey, for instance, usually takes about 10 weeks to administer and act upon, according to Smith & Henderson.
5. Give employees the power to act
Emerging survey and collaboration tools have the potential to empower employees and give them a voice in the organization, yet very few employees feel more empowered today than they did 10 years ago, says Gary Hamel, author of The Future of Management and What Matters Now, and a faculty member at the London Business School.
"Companies are overlaying [these technologies] over 19th century hierarchical management models" of top-down bureaucracy where workers have little decision-making power, Hamel says.
Collaboration tools have given employees access to more company knowledge than they ever had before, and layers of management are getting in the way of agile decision-making. Companies like GE, W.L. Gore and Whole Foods Market are adopting self-management models that give employees the power to act on that knowledge.
"We have to rethink everything we do around a new set of principles of openness, transparency, meritocracy and experimentation," says Hamel. "Companies that are on that journey are going to win."