When measuring an organization’s performance, it’s essential to look at engagement across all types of employees, since engaged employees are more likely to positively contribute to bottom-line business benefits and refer the company to others. We’ve found that engagement surveys are a valuable tool to get a holistic view into your organization’s efforts to support employees. Once you’ve got objective insights into what’s going on in your organization, you can help identify areas for growth and tailor your strategies to meet the needs of your workforce.

Orange Grove takes a comprehensive approach to engagement surveys. Here’s a little bit about the three components we utilize to measure engagement:

• Demographic Data Collection: We include demographics in our data collection efforts. This is important because we have found that there are often significantly differing levels of engagement depending on an employee’s membership in a demographic group.
• Qualitative Questions: In addition to quantitative questions, we use qualitative, open-ended questions. We analyze the qualitative data with text sentiment analysis to get to the root of the “why” behind their answers – this is due to the fact that sometimes people may not fully understand the question or have a different interpretation, and they may express themselves differently when writing in text.
• Data Analytics: We use advanced statistical techniques – specifically regression analysis – to help prioritize the dimensions of engagement as there are many of them which drive the overall engagement score of a business. This step is crucial since it will reveal the areas of improvement so that you can invest your time, energy, and resources on issues that will most drive overall engagement.

After you’ve collected and analyzed engagement survey data, it’s time for management to reflect on what you’ve found – both good or bad – and share those results with your organization to show that their feedback has been heard. This process can be done through group communication like in-person town hall meetings or digitally through email. You may also want to dive deeper into concerns raised by employees, such as pay transparency, through quantitative analysis.

Then, you’ll want to prioritize your actions based on the most critical drivers of engagement shown in your survey data. At this point, you’ll take the resources that you’ve already invested or are willing to invest and begin targeting them appropriately to the factors that the regression analysis revealed were the most important things to focus on. Finally, you’ll ensure that you’re making progress by tracking metrics. Since you’ve got quantitative data in hand now, you can use metrics to see how you’re moving the needle over time. This objective approach ensures that the changes you make to improve engagement are measurable and effective.

Engagement surveys are the key to understanding your organizational development progress in order to understand employee sentiment, both across all employee groups as well as differences in sentiment between groups so you can work to create a consistent and strong sense of engagement and belonging across the organization – for all employees. To learn more about how you can identify targeted opportunities of improvement, check out Orange Grove Consulting’s organizational assessments and surveys offerings.