Most large enterprises conduct employee engagement surveys every few years.  These surveys provide a good benchmark on the company culture and can be very useful tools for understanding employee sentiment.  The design and development of these tools has become a well-documented science.  There are numerous firms who specialize in the development of the instruments, the deployment of the surveys and the crunching of the results.

My experience in large organizations has shown me that driving participation is often a missing component of the engagement survey plan.  The result is that companies are measuring engagement with fewer than 70% of their employee populations in many cases.  Most companies rely on posters and emails to market the engagement survey campaigns. These tools are effective, but what I have found to be most effective is the use of a daily metrics report.

Organizations obsess around financial data, sharing daily business intelligence reports showing bookings, inventory, leads, accounts receivables and other data.  By leveraging a similar approach during the engagement survey period, organizations can achieve much higher participation rates.

The chart below shows a daily engagement survey report which was sent to all people managers within a global company during the survey period.  Each day the report was updated and showed the overall progress as well as the results by business unit, region and for the leadership team.  

By providing a daily visual, the leaders could see that they were being measured against their colleagues.  This graphical view of response rates translated into a 97% response rate for one business unit and helped push the enterprise response rate over 90%.  

Next time your organization is planning to launch an employee engagement survey, consider creating a daily metrics report to track survey completions.  This simple tool with definitely help to drive a higher completion rate.

For help creating a tool like this or other assistance marketing your employee engagement survey reach out to Groove Management.