Guide to Post Employee Survey Action Planning

Making that commitment a reality starts with advanced planning of specific post survey deliverables and timelines (before your survey is even launched).

Unfortunately, most employee engagement survey planning focuses only on the preparation and rollout. The post-survey activities are often overlooked.

Consequences? There is no timely follow-through to learn from your employees’ ideas and feedback and turn them into meaningful actions. Your employees will feel like it was a waste of their time and effort to share their ideas with you. Next time? They’ll think twice about sharing their feedback with you.

At Perked!, we’ve observed that organizations taking the time to commit their leadership team to post employee survey activities are able to achieve:

• Improved employee survey participation rate (on average +5 to 8%).
• Higher favourable score when employees were asked six months after the survey whether they have seen positive changes based on employee survey results

So what does effective planning for post-survey activities look like?

Here are the seven steps we work through with our partners. We’ll also share some Pro Tips that will hopefully make it a little easier for HR leaders leading this effort.

1. Share Results

Start with the timely sharing and communication of results with your leaders and managers. Provide targeted engagement insights most relevant to their employee focus area (e.g. their division or team segments).

• Deliverable: Platform user access login information emailed to leaders/managers. Communicate in advance when they should expect it.
• Target Date: Week 1 post-survey close

2. Learn Key Insights

Sharing results is not enough. Set your leaders up for success by providing educational sessions (in-person or online) on how to interpret results and highlight key findings. For example, at Perked!, we run leadership educational sessions (aka “Discovery Workshop”) for our partners to share the science behind the engagement survey methodology and highlight key findings and actionables. This way they have an easy way to review and learn from their own team’s results.

• Deliverable: Educational workshops for the leaders and managers you are sharing results with.
• Target Date: Week 2 post-survey close

3. Prioritize Focus Area(s)

After your leaders review their team’s engagement insights, it is time to determine which focus areas to prioritize action planning. This process starts by identifying your strengths (what are we doing well?), opportunities for improvement (what’s not going so well?), and areas to investigate further (what was unexpected that you may wish to explore further?).

• Deliverable: Leadership team meets to discuss and agree on Focus Areas for action.
• Target Date: Week 3 post-survey close

4. Plan Key Actions

With your prioritized focus areas, the next stage is to determine specific actions to improve them. How do you determine what actions to take? There are a few ways to approach this. Employee comments often contain useful suggestions catered to your company. You can also borrow ideas from best practices (real-world tested solutions) and adapt them to work in the unique work culture and environment of your organization. With the Perked! platform, you can respond to employee comments to learn more from their suggested solutions. In addition, you can turn to our Coach for recommended actions based on your results.

• Deliverable: Update your Action Plan so you can easily monitor progress and know which actions are coming due.
• Target Date: Weeks 3 to 5

5. Communicate Key Findings, Progress, and Actions

Communication needs to be a key component of your post-survey process. Keep your employees in the loop by openly communicating key findings, updates on where you are in the results-to-action process, and planned actions.

• Deliverable: Communication touchpoints via multiple communication channels (intranet, email, Slack, etc.).
• Target Date: Multiple touch points starting Week 1

6. Take Action

Take action on what you’ve committed to. Keep your team engaged by communicating progress and celebrating milestones on actions that may take a longer time to complete.

Check-in regularly on how your action plan is progressing. Work actively to remove barriers and adapt the plan to changes in situation. There are a variety of ways to monitor progress, whether that is through a short pulse focused on prioritized focus areas or 1:1 check-ins with leaders who own the actions.

• Deliverables: Revisit your Action Plan to track your progress as you complete the actions or make adjustments as needed. Send out a Pulse to listen to your team’s feedback on actions taken.

If your company has multiple levels of leadership, roll-out these seven stages separately to each level of your leadership. Not all at once, but as a cascade, starting with your executive leadership team and ultimately to your managers with direct reports.