So, you’ve just received the results from your employee engagement survey. What now?
This page will help you understand the results, feel confident in leading a team discussion, and ultimately build an action plan to facilitate development and action.
Action planning is important. It shows your organisation has listened, is taking on board the findings of the research, and is making changes. This is the biggest driver of future survey completion.
Where little or no action happens after a survey, employees feel resentful that they’ve participated in the research – and it leaves them questioning the value both of the exercise and of participation in future research.
How to approach action planning
Action planning is a process, and there are a few simple steps you can follow to make it a success.
Understand
Make sure you understand the data, and the issues behind the data, before you start putting solutions in place. Use methods like focus or listening groups to delve deeper into what your survey data is telling you. These are also a great way to brainstorm solutions from the people actually experiencing the issue.
Communicate
Communicate the results with your employees, as those who’ve participated in the research will expect to hear the results.
Action Planning
How will you make change happen? Break actions down and assign realistic timings for each stage, including how often you’ll meet as a team to discuss and communicate progress.
Make change visible
Colleagues don’t get survey fatigue, they get lack-of-action fatigue! Take an agile approach. Try to make changes that are visible and tangible, then communicate milestones on the way to bigger goals. Operational changes are easy to see, whereas behavioural changes may need to be highlighted.
Update at regular intervals
Discuss progress and any pressing issues during regular briefings. Keep an ‘open-door’ policy, so colleagues feel free to come to you with any questions. The more informed colleagues are, and the more context they’re given, the better equipped they’ll be to make day-to-day decisions that support organisational objectives.
Understand
Spend time fully understanding your results so you’re fully informed before you enter the planning stage.
Participation: This is the first thing to understand, and it's why response rates to surveys are important.
The higher the response rate, the more representative and indicative of the various demographic groups your data will be, and the more confident you can be in the accuracy of your results.
When response rates are low, it can signal underlying issues - employees may have lost trust in action-taking following previous surveys where promises went unfulfilled, or they may have concerns about confidentiality and whether their responses will truly remain anonymous. If response rates decline, data becomes less reliable, which can undermine confidence in both the results and subsequent initiatives.
Employee Engagement Score: At WorkBuzz we use the SAY, STAY, STRIVE model of employee engagement, which takes the average score across four questions to create a total score for Employee Engagement. The scores represent the percentage of people who rated the questions with ‘Agree’ and ‘Strongly Agree’.
⚠️💡What’s your Employee Engagement Score, and how does it compare to the organisation as a whole? If this survey is part of an ongoing employee listening programme, has your score gone up or down? 💡⚠️
Comparisons: While external benchmarks provide valuable context for understanding your position relative to similar organizations in your sector, your internal benchmark is far more meaningful for driving improvement.
The most important questions are:
How have your scores changed since your last survey?
Have you successfully addressed the core issues that were identified?
Every company has a unique culture, and within that culture exists a variety of subcultures across different teams and functions. External comparisons offer useful high-level perspective, but internal trending reveals whether your specific interventions are working.
⚠️💡Analyse teams that are scoring highly on the survey - what practices are they implementing differently or even, what behaviours are yielding to positive change? How can you introduce their successful approaches to other functions and departments? 💡⚠️
Other factors: WorkBuzz surveys are built by questions, which are then grouped into themes and reported as such. It might be one or two questions within a theme that are causing an impact, but thematic analysis is key to understanding the full picture.
⚠️💡Which themes score well, and which don’t? 💡⚠️
Open text comments: Manager access to comments is sometimes restricted because they can often be identifiable If you do have access to comments it’s best to read these once you already have a good understanding of the numbers. Comments provide insights into why employees score specific questions as they do, and can provide clarity for groups of colleagues who score a particular issue lower than others.
Finding focus for action planning is sometimes difficult, and it’s a good idea not to do it in isolation – so involve colleagues within your team. However, there will be key things that stand out from your data, such as a question or theme that has room for improvement (low favourability or below comparisons) and has a high impact on employee engagement.
Within the WorkBuzz platform we’ve done the hard work for you, identifying the key drivers of employee engagement – the questions that have the highest impact on engagement.
For more information on Impact on Engagement please see the article here.
Communicate
Sharing the results with your team helps to create a sense of openness &transparency and involves colleagues in shaping the actions which can make a positive difference. When communicating your results:
How to communicate disappointing results
- Be open. Transparency is critical when it comes to improving the colleague experience. You’ve involved employees up to this point, so don’t shut them out now. The more open you are about your results, the more your employees will trust and respect you for being honest with the feedback.
- Share results that are both good and bad. Celebrate the great results but resist the temptation to undermine or dismiss negative feedback. Acknowledge it, thank colleagues for highlighting areas for improvement, and explain that you aim to make changes going forward. Let them know they can come to you with ideas and solutions – encourage people to stay involved with the process.
- View negative feedback as an opportunity for growth. Remember, ‘poor’ results are much better, and a lot more helpful, than no results at all. All feedback should be viewed as a potential tool for improvement. Whether the feedback relates to management style or support, organisational processes or development opportunities, once you’re aware of weaknesses you can begin to turn things around.
- Keep positive — don’t take bad feedback out on colleagues. The worst thing you can do with negative feedback is let it affect mood and behaviour. Managers might be hurt or even frustrated, but they can’t take it out on their teams. Employees need to know it’s ‘safe to speak up’ and that they can come to you with concerns.
- Think about the context. Perhaps there have been a lot of changes in the management team in the last year which have created uncertainty? How are people feeling about those changes?
Action Planning
Once the understanding and communication phases have been completed, it’s time to create your actions.
- Create a series of results sessions at a local level (usually on an individual team level), to understand if the results reflect how employees are feeling right now – and if they have any further feedback they want to share.
- Agree THREE simple priorities to focus on for your action plan. Any more than this and action planning becomes unmanageable.
- Create an action plan and proactively work as a team to successfully deliver the key priorities.
- Share progress throughout the year.
How to create an action plan
- Download our Celebrate, Investigate, Improve template . Start with your findings, and when you’ve had a chance to review your results, plot them into the table.
- Celebrate areas of strength and work on plans to maintain and continue the behaviour in these areas.
- Investigate the topic areas you want to understand in more detail.
- Improve by action planning around specific areas. Remember that, often, areas of action are not mutually exclusive –taking positive action in one area can improve positivity in another.
- Are there any items raised in this survey you would (or would not) have expected?
- Rank activity to find ‘priority areas’ – these are those where you can make the most positive impact.
Action planning workshops
Action planning workshops are a good way to not just plan your actions, but to dive deeper into the results, get a better understanding of why employees answered the survey questions like they did, and discover what they see as key priorities.
They also allow managers to explain the purpose of the action planning workshop: that it’s space for people to share their views and inform change, not to hear about plans you’ve already made. It will be important to be open, honest and transparent.
It’s important that colleagues and teams focus on actions you can take as individuals or as a team. Only action things you can control – other actions or ideas should be fed back, usually to a central team, to be included in higher-level or corporate action plans.
An effective action planning workshop helps employees understand survey data and, critically, involves them in idea generation and commitment to targeted actions.
Before the session:
- Get yourself familiar with the survey data from your team.
- Share key findings with colleagues.
- Explain the purpose of the workshop to attendees.
During the session:
- Be open, honest and transparent. Reassure your team that you don’t know who said what (and that you’re not interested in finding out).
- Celebrate your successes and dig into the areas where you scored less positively.
- Ask your team if there were any surprises in the results, whether there’s other evidence to back up the scores, and how they’d like to see your scores change next year.
To wrap up the session:
- Prioritise three actions with the biggest impact on employee engagement.
- Assign owners and due dates to each action.
- Focus on actions you can take as individuals or a team, and make a note of any that need to be communicated onwards.
After the session:
- Commit as a team to keep up momentum.
- Agree how to share progress. You might add action planning to the agenda of one-to-ones, or discuss in regular team meetings.
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