Is the Engagement Survey the Only Way?

Organizations are faced with a new challenge as the landscape around employee sensing evolves: Beyond a traditional engagement survey, where can organizations look to gather employee data and subsequently analyze, interpret, and act upon those data to enhance the employee experience? A useful starting point is to be aware of the plethora of sources for employee sensing available today. This chapter covers a range of internal, external, active, and passive data sources that organizations can use to expand their listening systems beyond surveys. The data sources described include network data, biometrics, internal ticket management data, and others. Use cases provide concrete examples of how these data sources are being applied to employee sensing.

Open-Ended Questions

Natural language processing (NLP) is the field of decoding human written language. This chapter responds to the growing interest in using machine learning–based NLP approaches for analyzing open-ended employee survey responses. These techniques address scalability and the ability to provide real-time insights to make qualitative data collection equally or more desirable in organizations. The chapter walks through the evolution of text analytics in industrial–organizational psychology and discusses relevant supervised and unsupervised machine learning NLP methods for survey text data, such as latent Dirichlet allocation, latent semantic analysis, sentiment analysis, word relatedness methods, and so on. The chapter also lays out preprocessing techniques and the trade-offs of growing NLP capabilities internally versus externally, points the readers to available resources, and ends with discussing implications and future directions of these approaches.

Writing Organizational Survey Items That Predict What Matters in Organizations

Organizational surveys are essential tools for gathering data in 21st-century organizations. This chapter provides a practitioner-oriented guide to developing survey content and items. In this chapter, the authors highlight the need to first determine highly specific survey project goals and deduce broad survey content domains based on those goals. They advise practitioners to build close relationships with employees and line managers to develop short survey tools that are organizationally relevant and predictive of organizational outcomes of interest (i.e., customer satisfaction, employee retention). Based on extant research evidence around item and scale development, they discuss response formats, survey length considerations, respondent literacy issues, and cultural as well as language considerations relevant to survey development. They conclude with ethical considerations and a brief summary.

Lifecycle Surveys

Lifecycle surveys include efforts such as onboarding surveys to help organizations gauge how welcomed employees feel as they join an organization and exit surveys to tell them why individuals quit. These types of surveys reflect the building and maintaining of a discipline of listening and responding to employees to improve the experience of individuals as well as systems at large within organizations. This chapter reviews how to avoid common limitations in designing these efforts, such as focusing on the individual experience at the expense of the organizational system’s performance or confusing the tool with the objective. Through tips and advice for the most frequently used lifecycle surveys (onboarding, exit, and census), this chapter provides a roadmap for creating and managing a larger landscape of lifecycle information, providing value not just to understand the employee perspective from onboarding through exit but also to support the organization’s strategy and performance.

Exploring the Universe of Pulse Surveys and Continuous Listening Opportunities

Organizational leaders recognize how shifts in employee attitudes and behaviors can have a notable impact on a variety of customer and business outcomes, and the collection of timely people insights has become a critical tool to help organizations shape and inform actions and decisions. These efforts are aided by technological advances that allow for more frequent and diverse ways to assess employee perceptions and preferences. However, these methods come with inherent risks and opportunities. This chapter is designed to help organizations better understand and implement pulsing and continuous listening approaches. The authors outline considerations for successful programs and propose a taxonomy to define the surveys that may be used. The taxonomy joins two continua—action focus (action-tracking or action-driving) and formality (formal or informal). With the understanding that there is no one-size-fits-all approach for listening programs, the authors encourage careful consideration and program design that acknowledges organizational strategies, culture, and business need.

Employee Surveys Move into the Future

This chapter looks at how employee surveys have changed in recent decades and points to likely uses in the future. Surveys fulfill various purposes for different organizations over time, ranging from pure assessment to driving change. Generally, there has been a beneficial evolution in their form and use. Surveys focus less now on assessing employee satisfaction than on predicting work performance. More attention is put on employee engagement and on using survey findings for meaningful responses and change. At the same time, a technological revolution in computing has made surveys cheaper, faster, easier, and more tailored to various purposes. These shifts have also created speed bumps for practitioners, as when employee-identified surveys run into new privacy laws. The concept of employee engagement is seen as a major challenge in coming years as scientist-practitioners seek to better understand just why higher engagement is linked to better individual and organizational performance.

Linkage Analysis

Linkage analysis is a framework for determining the impact that employee attitudes, as measured by organizational surveys, have on business outcomes. Linking employee attitudes to outcomes such as employee turnover and performance provides a compelling business case for executives to invest both emotionally and financially in employee surveys. The current chapter reviews the large body of research supporting the linkage analysis framework, as well as common approaches and challenges. Three case studies from the field are also presented, along with practical recommendations for translating linkage results into meaningful actions that organizations can take. The authors conclude by sharing the implications of linkage analysis in an era of big data.

Strategic Climate Research

The chapter summarizes the conceptual and empirical writing and research on organizational climate surveys that have strategic foci. Strategic foci means that such surveys contain items descriptive of organizational policies, practices, procedures, and behaviors that get rewarded, supported, and expected and that link directly with important strategic organizational outcomes like service and safety. The conceptual logic for such surveys was stimulated by an early emphasis on the need for organizational climate surveys to “focus on something” and not be abstract or undefined. The chapter reviews the theory and the resultant convincing evidence that supports this climate for something approach, focusing especially on the climate for service and the climate for safety. Examples of foci-specific climate survey items are also provided.

Employee Preferences

Understanding and delivering on employee preferences results in real business outcomes, such as more effective hiring, decreased attrition, and stronger customer service. The authors begin with an introduction to the literature on employee preferences, especially as related to the employee value proposition (EVP), employer branding, and person–organization and person–job fit. They advocate using direct preference measurement techniques such as ranking, point-allocation exercises, and conjoint surveys that require respondents to make trade-offs that reveal what matters most to them and supplementing these with qualitative techniques such as interviews, focus groups, and open-ended comments to provide additional context. The authors emphasize the importance of using the information collected to ensure that the EVP supports the organization’s strategy and will be credible to employees and candidates, while conveying what differentiates them from talent competitors.

Current and Future Trends in Employee Survey Practice

Although employee surveys have been around for decades with well-established frameworks and best practices, there has been a recent influx of experimentation. Given advances in technology and the need for business leaders to make rapid, evidence-based decisions, organizations are rethinking their traditional survey approach. However, very little has been published describing the prevalence of these new survey practices. The purpose of this study was to understand current and future/planned states of employee surveys within organizations from the perspective of employee survey practitioners. This chapter is based on responses from 57 large, typically multinational organizations with established employee survey programs. The results focus on how and whom organizations survey today and other program design elements including the type of surveys being administered, survey cadence, reporting options, and data privacy. The chapter concludes with program owner attitudes toward the effectiveness of various survey program elements.