What Is The Best HR Strategy To Get To The Root Cause Of Employee Engagement Issues

“Human Resources Isn’t A Thing We Do. It’s The Thing That Runs Our Business.”

Employees are the life and breath of any company. No organisation could survive without people ready to give their all in for the success of their company. Human capital is the most important piece of any organisation and so is the work of Human Capital Consultant to come up with the best strategy to make these important assets of the company happy and engaged.

As HR Strategy Consultants, we help many firms to lay out a perfect way to get to the root cause of Employee Engagement Issues and that is the Employee Surveys. Asking employee for their feedback on how company is doing as a whole is very important. However, to have a real impact, companies need to figure out what would they want to with the data they have collected. The actions of the company as a result of survey that sends out a message that the feedback given by the employees was valuable.

Employees survey starts a conversation over which some constructive solutions can be built. So what are the exact touchpoints which your employee survey should cover. Apart from some custom questions, there are 4 problem areas which every organisation needs to address:

Communication - Communication is the most important for any organisation to accomplish their goals. At the same time, every employee need to communicate in order to perform well. As communication is so important, there can be issues around these which need to be addressed to ensure a smooth functioning of the work.

The survey should include questions like, “Do you get the assistance you need from your manager in order to perform well in your role?”, “Do you think you and your manager has a communication rhythm?” Having an understanding around this could help the company go a long way in finding out the root cause of Employee Engagement Issues.

Management - Company and Managers go side by side. Any work that is done is done through managers. So having a healthy management practices in place is very important. As it is said, “People do not leave companies, they leave managers.” an employee survey can help you see a bigger picture that where exactly the problem area lies.

The survey could include question like, “Does your manager challenges you enough to improve?”, “What is the one thing you expect your manager to do which he is currently not doing?”, “Would you recommend your manager to anyone?” etc.

Misalignment - This is a tricky one as there could be no direct way to judge this. It could be possible that managers face issues communicating, which gives a whole new angle to the employee engagement conversation and the prospective solutions. It could be because of policies and culture don’t match OR performance and communication doesn’t match OR communications and culture don’t match.

The survey could include questions like, “Suggest a change that would improve your confidence in the future of our organization?” or “Mention one suggestion you want to give to the organisation as a whole to keep its employees satisfied?

Change Management - Everything ultimately boils down to finding the root cause and making a change for good. And employees will only give an honest feedback when they are sure that their feedback would be taken seriously and it would not be something that would become a cause of trouble for them. Trust is a key ingredient in Employee surveys.

The survey could include questions like, “Would you recommend this company to your friend?” or “Do you see yourself in this company in next five years?” or “Are you excited about the company’s future?”

Keeping these 4 areas would help collate a helpful survey but as we mentioned any feedback is nothing until acted upon and taken seriously. To ensure that employees are satisfied that actions are taken up on what they said, the companies can roll up a Follow-Up survey and ask the employees how they feel about the changes that has been in place because the success of survey is based totally on the actions taken from that survey.