Best Workplaces,  Company Culture,  Employee Engagement ,  Employee Survey,  Retention

Now more than ever, it is important to get a pulse on your culture and understand how your employees are feeling and how you can best support them. Across Canada, the workplace is changing and the Best Workplaces™ are adapting to these changes by first and foremost prioritizing their people. They know employee engagement surveys are key as their people actively reassess their career goals, examine their own priorities, and ask how well their organization listens to them and evolves to meet their needs.

As a leader, one of the most important steps you can take to demonstrate your commitment to making your people a priority is to launch an employee survey to gather candid and confidential feedback.

An employee survey will help you determine:

• How your employees are feeling?
• What matters the most to them?
• What they need to feel supported and valued?

These insights are what the Best Workplaces in Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec use to develop and sustain their strong workplace culture; with the end result being high satisfaction and engagement. This leads to supportive statements like the following, which impact a full range of employee metrics including attraction, retention, motivation and production.

Insights	AB	BC	ON	QC
Taking everything into account, I would say this is a great place to work.	91%	94%	92%	94%
When I look at what we accomplish, I feel a sense of pride.	91%	93%	90%	92%

What is an employee engagement survey?

An employee engagement survey is exactly what it sounds like: a way for you to measure how engaged your employees are – both with the work they are doing and with the overall organization – and equip yourself with key insights and feedback.

At Great Place to Work®, we recommend taking surveying a step further to measure employee experience. Measuring employee engagement, while important, is just one part of the puzzle.

How an employee engagement survey helps you improve company culture?

An employee engagement survey is the crucial first step to understanding and improving your company culture. It provides an aerial view of your organization’s strengths and areas of opportunity, feedback that is essential for identifying where you need to focus your attention and action.

It also measures the degree to which your employees feel motivated and excited by their work, your organization and its mission – and where you can make changes to improve company culture.

A 6-step plan for an effective employee survey

1. Find the survey tool that best serves your needs

Identify what you want to learn from your employee survey results and ensure that the survey tool you choose will help you uncover those insights.

• Do you want to understand how employee engagement varies across organizational departments?
• Do you need to diagnose which demographic groups feel less engaged in their work than others, and why?

"Our employee experience survey enables you to customize your survey with demographic questions unique to your organization, equipping you with actionable insights to improve employee engagement."

2. Get buy-in from key leaders within your organization

Convincing executives that company culture matters can be difficult, but it is possible. Many executive teams are curious about employee opinions but do not have access to the frontline or middle management in a meaningful way. A focused survey is a great way to get executives preliminary feedback so they can understand where they may want to dig deeper.

For best results, talk to key leaders within your organization to determine what is most important to them:

• What kind of data do they want to see from an employee engagement survey?
• What are the organization’s goals for the year and how does an employee engagement survey fit into those goals?

This should determine some of the survey questions and demographics (such as department, locations etc.) you might want to add to your employee engagement survey.

3. Drum up excitement among your people

Now that everyone is aligned and you are ready to prep and launch your employee engagement survey, communicate to employees why you are asking for their feedback.

Emphasizing the why will ultimately increase engagement and survey participation. Knowing and believing the “what’s in it for me?” will make employees eager to provide honest, direct and detailed feedback.

"A successful survey starts and ends with great communication as it leads to more engagement and buy-in from all areas of the business."

4. Launch your survey

When you run an employee survey through Great Place to Work, you will see real-time participation numbers, which allows you to remind or encourage employees to submit their responses. You'll also gain access to the most comprehensive employee experience data set, spanning over 30 years of surveying employees around the country and the world.

5. Benchmark your results

Compare the experience of your employees with credible benchmark data and gain an independent perspective about how well you perform compared to other companies.

By measuring your employee engagement scores against benchmarks you can identify what employees expect from industries and companies. This is vital intel for closing culture gaps and improving employee engagement and retention.

Benchmarking can also help you define a clear employee value proposition by understanding what makes your organization unique relative to others. A strong and distinct employee value proposition will help you stand apart from other workplaces, refine your marketing messages and attract the right candidates.

6. Analyze and share the results

You have completed your survey and uncovered a treasure trove of valuable employee feedback. Now, the work begins: Using your results, you must figure out where your strengths and areas of opportunity lie.

First and foremost, thank employees for participating in the survey and sharing their candid feedback. Let them know you appreciate their responses and will be spending some time diving into the results.

Once you have developed a robust list of questions, curiosities and observations about your data, it’s time to share them with the wider company. Interpreting results is a key first step, but creating a clear action plan to share with employees is crucial.

"With our employee survey tool, you can easily download reports with meaningful charts and benchmarks that make it easy to present the results to the broader company and identify your strengths and what is undermining your culture."

---

To improve your employee experience, measure your employee experience

If you have questions about running an employee engagement survey, or you’re ready to launch your own, reach out to us. We’re here to help gather the information you need to make the right decisions for your employees and your organization.

Great Place to Work® makes it easy to survey your employees, uncover actionable insights and get recognized for your great company culture. Clients apply our insights, advice, and tools to fuel the vision, decisions and actions that drive business performance.

---

Nancy Fonseca