Speaker 1: Hello, my name is Murray Chapman and I lead INSYNC's health and community services practice. Today I'm sharing six ideas on how to respond to your employee engagement survey so that you can connect with your employees and get their support for your improvement journey. The first idea is to communicate your results promptly and effectively. Employees need to hear that you have heard them and that you will be responding to their feedback and addressing their concerns. Timeliness, authenticity, transparency and sequence are very important. Here are five ways to do that. Number one, share and discuss the results and their implications with your executive and senior leadership teams so that they fully understand what the survey has said and are in a position to answer any employee questions. Secondly, very soon after the survey is closed, your CEO should send out an email to all staff thanking them for their participation and summarising the key messages that have come out of the survey. Thirdly, you can provide face-to-face feedback to employees, in these days also possibly using video technology, and you can do that either at an all-staff meeting or you can do it by location or function, depending on exactly what your circumstances are. Following the debriefs, we suggest that you issue an all-staff bulletin which summarises your main strengths and your main improvement areas. It normally would be in the newsletter format and it would take between one and four pages. It would be very authentic and very transparent. It would include a few sample employee comments, both about what you're doing well and about where you can improve. And finally, the fifth step is to make sure that you continue to refer back to employee survey results and that you give people regular updates. A very good format for doing that is to say, this is what you said, this is what we've done, and this is what we're going to do next. And that should happen at least every two months or possibly every quarter. The second idea is to make sure that you understand your survey results before you decide what to do. This might sound a little bit odd, but sometimes it can be perplexing and hard to understand exactly what employees meant when they responded to a survey result. For example, perhaps fewer than half of employees said that they feel as if they're using their skills and their talents to their full potential, and you may genuinely not understand that. In a case like that, it's worth actually going back to employees, either via one-on-one meetings or via focus groups to understand what's behind that and what would fix it. The third idea is to prioritize the areas that you're going to address. Ideally you don't create new work for yourself. Ideally you look at your business plan and you can see that initiatives are already there, and you might expand some of the ideas in your business plan or you might change the sequence or you might prioritize certain things. But ideally you're not creating a whole lot of extra work for yourself. You also don't need to address all the problems. It's absolutely fine to prioritize two or three, and we normally recommend you only do two or three, get that right, and then move on to lower priority items. Employees actually respond really well if you say we've looked at a whole range of ideas and things that we could do, but we've decided to focus on just these two or three things in the immediate term. These are the reasons why we've chosen these two or three things. We want to implement them properly, and then we'll move on to other things. That normally gets a very good response from employees. Our fourth idea is to evaluate your response options. There are in fact three ways in which you can respond. Many organizations only consider one way, which is designing and implementing initiatives. And this is almost always necessary. The downside of initiatives is that they do consume time, effort, and often money. Two alternatives are firstly to simplify the way you do things. Often by removing obstacles, doing less, taking things away, it actually lifts employee engagement enormously. So it's a very powerful way of addressing issues by actually simplifying your operations and making things easier. There's also another way, which is around changing behaviors. So for example, if you meet with your employees once a month for regular catch-ups, just putting a bit more structure, a bit more thinking into what you're already doing, changing your behaviors, can deliver fantastic results. The fifth idea is to set specific goals relating to the issues that you've decided to address. We suggest that you choose a small number of survey items where you might set a specific improvement target. For example, if 50% of your employees indicated that they're inspired by the organization's vision, you might decide to set that a target of, say, 60% for your next survey. When you then look at all the initiatives and plans and simplification pieces, behavior change that you've put in place, you can actually look at that and say, will that actually impact that outcome measure? Will it help 60% of people to be inspired by our organization vision? So it does help you really focus on the most important things and making sure that the actions you're going to take will actually deliver the results that you're looking for. Finally, you need to agree how you're going to follow through. Agree how you're going to implement the prioritized actions and how you're going to follow through. You might make it a regular meeting agenda item, or you might set up a subcommittee responsible for your action plan, or you might implement a staff forum to see these actions through. Setting specific goals, measuring progress, and keeping up communication feedback will help to keep people focused on implementing their agreed actions. In summary then, speed, authenticity, and prioritization are key elements in responding to your survey results. Err on the side of under-promising and over-delivering. We wish you every success as you respond to your survey results to enhance employee engagement and thereby achieve better business results.