Employee research

High levels of positive engagement and commitment will help to drive a company forward, making it an energetic and vibrant force in the market.

Low levels of engagement can have the opposite affect.

Employee satisfaction (ESAT) surveys are in fashion, but of what use are they? Are they just a spurious exercise introducing a meaningless human resource metric, or a valuable management tool?

Well it depends. Employee surveys can easily lack a balance in the types of question asked, can be skewed towards factual process driven responses, away from the psychological issues that drive employee engagement. Such surveys can themselves lower engagement by raising expectations amongst employees that their responses will be acted upon. The frequently observed lack of subsequent action can cause reduced morale and spark the negative outcomes the research was designed to investigate.

Symptoms of a disconnected ESAT:

• A rising ESAT score but no improvement in engagement
• A falling ESAT score but no fall-off in engagement
• Lack of transparent link between the questions and actions within the business
• Holding meetings every year to decide how best to improve the ESAT score

ESAT in itself is a spurious name. You can have very satisfied employees who are lazy and non-productive. We prefer Employee Engagement Research (EER) as a more suitable title for what needs to be done.

In our opinion EER should be designed as part of an integrated employee engagement strategy. The research element should be the front-end of a process, unearthing issues that are then acted upon. The effect of the actions are measured in terms of real measurable facts: improvement in the Key Performance Indicators of the business.  The process of continually measuring the ESAT score against itself assumes that the issues are the same from year to year, which is almost certainly not true!

We work closely with Epiphanies LLP a business focused on developing the human resource by 'changing behaviours for more profitable ones'. This relationship enables us to design end-to-end employee engagement solutions, undertaking the research with epiphanies LLP  implementing the development support often required to improve people's performance and psychological contract.