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Making Company Culture Evolutions, Not Revolutions, With Employee Surveying

Forbes Human Resources Council
POST WRITTEN BY
Jim Link

The pace of change in our personal and professional lives is quickening, and with this comes an expectation from workers of immediate feedback. The need for right-now, real-time information has changed the way HR leaders think about their human capital strategy as well as their day-to-day interactions. With younger Generation Y and Z employees now making up half of the workforce, the pace is only expected to quicken. These workers are geared toward moving fast and getting fast responses. They grew up in the digital era, surrounded by an on-demand economy. As a result, they tend to carry expectations for immediacy in most aspects of their lives.

Put these two evolving and disparate forces together, and you see why businesses must adapt faster — to everything, especially to the way they work alongside and manage talent.

One of the ways CHROs and employers can embrace this is with a more frequent employee feedback process. And by feedback, I do not just mean manager-to-employee performance feedback, though that is important, too. I mean employee-to-company feedback. Giving employees a voice is the new way to drive company culture. Listening to employees can give businesses the insight they need to build and adjust company practices and programming with the ultimate goal of securing bottom-line business results while improving engagement and retention in the end.

More Frequent Employee Feedback = More Insight For Employee Engagement

Employers need to move toward a culture where they are responsive to employees’ needs and attentive to their feedback. It is a major shift, though, and I estimate this idea of real-time performance management and surveying will be a big change for 90% of organizations.

While most employers conduct some semblance of employee engagement surveying, more often than not, it’s annual. That is far too infrequent to detect any meaningful shifts in workforce sentiment or make any impactful changes to the overall employee experience. Why run a survey once a year when you can do it monthly or quarterly and get more timely insight into the health of your workforce?

Some business and HR leaders I have spoken with are concerned about inundating employees with additional tasks outside their normal duties, but more frequent surveying should not be viewed as a distraction. It should be viewed as a necessity. It is the first step in a crucial workplace transformation process that is needed to meet the growing needs and demands of an always-now, always-on workforce.

Providing feedback and seeing it addressed quickly is something every worker craves, no matter their generation, and employers need to put a structure in place to survey and have meaningful conversations with their people on a frequent basis. We instituted a process for this at Randstad in 2017 and it has really given us the data and understanding needed to build an employee experience that reflects the priorities and values of our current workforce.

Real-Time Feedback Requires Fast Action

What’s so effective about the surveying in our program is that we are taking immediate action based on our learnings. The key to making frequent employee surveying work is both asking questions and addressing the answers through performance management discussions and cultural evolutions. Note that I said evolutions, not revolutions. The outcome should not be some laborious year-long plan where outcomes take forever to see implemented.

People will not sit around and wait for you. They want to understand that you heard their feedback and are responding to it and making small but important adjustments based on their needs. Through our surveying, for example, we uncovered our learning and development program was one of the things our people valued most, so we invested even more in it, adding more expertise and content across the globe and redesigning it to apply the latest technological capabilities like virtual scenarios and gaming.

Another key learning was that our people valued work-life fluidity over work-life balance, meaning more flexibility during the day rather than strictly working 9-to-5. In response, we worked at local and enterprise-wide levels to build out work-flex programming, ensuring company and employee needs were met. More frequent surveying was a catalyst for these conversations to happen, removing the taboo and allowing people to think freely about new ways to get work done.

Having this “data lake” of employee feedback at your disposal allows leadership to corroborate things assumed to be true as well as uncover entirely new employee engagement mechanisms at the same time. There is such an incredible amount of information available in each survey round that can help to improve culture and management. Managers, too, should have access to results, which should be anonymized, to see how employees are feeling and to make adjustments in their team cultures as they see fit.

The expectation for real-time access and response that people have in their consumer lives does not get forgotten when they enter the workplace. The shift to a more responsive and agile culture is something every employer will need to adopt in short order.

Frequent employee surveying is a critical first step that will allow you to detect even the most minor changes in engagement from month to month. It is an incredibly powerful thing, leading to increased employee success and, ultimately, corporate success — and it is something every CHRO or HR leader should be leading at their workplace.

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