It is best to make sure you understand what your employees are thinking when it comes to work at your organization.  Without their thoughts, any efforts you make to define or refine a positive work environment will be short –sighted.  Start first with creating and distributing an employee engagement survey to summarize the current health of your organization.  Only then will you be able to identify the key issues that possibly stunt organizational culture, employee engagement, and financial success.  Below are six easy steps to help you successfully launch your next employee engagement survey.

1. Create your survey to measure various employee perceptions.              

You want your survey to capture perceptions that deal with overall key engagement drivers such as, manager effectiveness, confidence in senior leadership, trust in coworkers, teamwork, company goal alignment, employee recognition/appreciation, company communications, job satisfaction, company culture, physical work conditions, training & development, diversity, work/life balance, quality & safety, and compensation/ benefits.

2. Launch the survey and set the right expectations.

You can survey your entire population or select a sample size of your population.  Write your introduction to include the reason for distributing the survey at this time.  To get a high response rate, let them know that their answers will be anonymous and that the organization has a plan in place to evaluate and address the issues shared in the results.

3. Review, categorize, and prioritize survey responses.

Group survey responses by themes, tag them according to their organizational impact (i.e., low priority, high priority, opportunity, risk, etc.), and your ability to influence the change.  You should also segment responses by business unit and department.  Communicate your results with your decision makers including your assessment of what you believe should be high or low priority.  Consider including employees in this analysis process because they can bring insight around action planning from a local, functional, and/or department perspective.

4. Communicate Results and Follow Up Steps

Don’t wait too long to send a survey results summary to your employees.  Six to eight weeks after closing your survey is a fair duration and will ensure the survey is still fresh in their minds.

5. Create and track an engagement action plan

Manage the implementation of each change that has been agreed upon by the organization. The plan at minimum should include key action items, owners, and action deadlines. Periodically send out communications to your employees informing them of the progress being made on the engagement action plan.  Communication follow up alone will help to strengthen your position as an employer who cares and improve your company engagement and morale levels.

6. Review and sustain engagement measures

Accountability is essential to sustain any levels of change initiated by your engagement action plan.  Partner with your managers to review team engagement levels periodically and incorporate the results into your company’s performance management process. This will help employees take ownership of the change requests captured in the employee engagement survey.  This will help to ensure commitment from every organizational level and alert leaders on who needs extra development via coaching or other tools.  Communication follow up is always important with sustainability efforts.  So, communicate employee engagement metrics and success to employees alongside other company result metrics like company profits.  Continuous review, feedback, and coaching will place you well on your way to a winning workplace.