The Art & Science of Employee Engagement:THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE

Introduction 1-5

6-10

11-16

16-19

Getting Started

Using Your Results

Conclusion

01

02

03

04

ContentsTable of

Contents

1

About TalmetrixTalmetrix™ is more than just software. We work with talent-focused companies to capture insights, analyze data, take action, and achieve organizational growth.

Talmetrix captures and interprets employee facts and feelings to uncover unique insights, leading to action plans that accelerate the ability to deliver organizational change. Our relentless focus helps customers retain talent, reduce organizational risk, improve productivity, and ultimately increase profitiability.

Leading brands, like Coca-Cola and Voya, use the Talmetrix platform to measure and facilitate their employee engagement to understand and improve business outcomes and processes including:

Stop Guessing, Start Knowing.

Talent Retention

Change Management

Performance Improvement

Culture Alignment

Innovation

New Leader Assimilation & on-boarding

Risk Mitigation

Customer Satisfaction

M&A Integrations

2

01: Introduction

The Art and Science of Employee EngagementEmployee engagement. It’s a buzzword and hot topic, and there’s good reason. Improving engagement among employees has a direct impact on a company’s bottom line. Engaged organizations are high-performance organizations, and that’s why all leaders — not just HR leaders — should pay attention to their most critical asset – their PEOPLE. We see two sides to the engagement coin: the science (gathering valid data using the principles of scientific research) and the art (embracing the gray area of people management and getting creative to solve the problems that are unique to your organization). In this eBook, we answer the most common questions we hear about both the art and science of employee engagement.

Understanding EngagementQ: What is employee engagement?

A: Employee Engagement is an employee's willingness to put forth extra effort because of the connection they have with the company.

Q: Are engagement and satisfaction the same?

A: No! It’s possible for employees to be satisfied without feeling fully engaged at their organization. This can happen when employees are comfortable in their jobs, but aren’t necessarily feeling energized or challenged.

Q: How do I align engagement goals with business goals?

A: It’s important for leaders and employees to understand that engagement has a direct impact on the company’s ability to achieve desired business results. Identify your engagement goals by starting with your strategic business goals. For example, if one of your business goals is to “increase revenue by 20 percent over the next quarter,” identify ways that improved engagement would make that happen. Perhaps you need a better communication plan or an incentive program. Connect your engagement initiative to departments or teams that generate revenue. Like any business goal, an engagement goal should be measurable and achievable.

3

“In its purest essence, employee engagement

is the connection people have

to your company.”

-David Youssefnia, Ph.D.

4

Employees believe in the company. Employees would agree with the following statements:

“I feel like this company has a strong future.”

“This company is headed in the right direction.”

Employees love their work. Sure, everyone has bad days, and there are certainly some aspects of our work that we’d rather not have to do. but if employees generally enjoy the tasks you’re required to complete as part of your job, you’re more likely to be engaged.

Employees feel like you have a future at the company. Do employees feel that they have a clear career path? Do they have support to develop skills they need (and desire) to move up in the company?

Employees trust senior leaders. It’s possible for employees to trust leaders in an organization even if they don’t agree with their decisions.

Employees think their managers are doing a good job. Managers are important when it comes to engagement, since they’re the ones who put engagement plans into action and report back about what they’re seeing. If a manager believes in employees, acts in ways that are aligned with what the company values, and gives employees the tools to succeed, employees are going to report higher levels of engagement.

Q: What are the key drivers of engagement?

A.There are 5 main drivers of employee engagement.

1

2

3

4

5

5

“Employee engagement is no different than any other

business strategy—identify what you want to achieve, measure what it takes to get there, and identify the insights that build

success.” —Chris Powell, Talmetrix CEO

6

02: Getting StartedWhen getting started, remember that it’s not just up to HR to create and implement initiatives that improve the employee experience. Because productivity, turnover, customer satisfaction, and the bottom line are all impacted by engagement, the employee experience isn’t solely HR’s responsibility.

Although simplified, an engagement journey requires three main, ongoing components:

Collection

The capture of employee feedback through multiple formats, including baseline surveys, pulse surveys, and crowd-sourced social feedback is going to be a critical component to improving outcomes in any company.

Consumption

Organizations need to be sure they are taking advantage, or consuming, existing organization data from disparate platforms—whether that be house payroll, performance, customer and revenue data into one easy-to-interpret solution.

The Story

Collection and consumption won’t mean anything unless the underlying drivers are identified and then acted upon. Any engagement program needs ongoing, real-time analytics enabling the identification of drivers of engagement, retention, culture, performance and productivity.

Let’s dig deeper to learn what you need to know as you go about building surveys.

Building an Employee SurveyQ: What are the different kinds of employee surveys?

A: There are three core methods you can use to survey employees:

“The numbers tell the

story. 87% of the global

workforce is disengaged.

Clearly, this has a significant impact on

both morale and the

balance sheet. Employee

engagement is no longer an HR strategy, it is a business

strategy.”

–Chris Powell, TalmetrixCEO

Baseline Surveys:

These are the long-form surveys most of us are familiar with. Many companies are moving away from an annual survey each year in

favor of more frequent, targeted surveys that

deliver actionable data.

Pulse Surveys:

These short surveys often include just a few questions. Pulse surveys

are best for following up on specific topics or gauging ongoing progress during an

engagement initiative. Learn more about when to use the Pulse Survey.

Social feedback surveys:

These surveys ask open-ended questions to

solicit ideas, comments or brainstorming from

employees. They’re intended less for

generating trackable data about how employees

feel and more for getting feedback on ideas.

7

Q: How do I create great survey questions?

A: At their core, surveys seem simple — ask a question, get an answer. But the kinds of questions you ask can nudge people toward a certain answer or away from what they mean. If you partner with an Employee Engagement solution provider you may be able to utilize their scientific survey questions (Talmetrix has a survey question library of over 200 questions.) If you want to add questions that are unique to your organization, here are the writing basics:

Q: What’s the difference between a “confidential” survey and an “anonymous” survey?

A: In a confidential survey, responses could be combined with other data, such as demographics or other filters, to conceivably connect responses to an individual, particularly if response rates are low. By combining data in this way, efforts are made so that you can’t connect results to one individual.

An anonymous survey ensures that responses cannot be connected to individual people. How? Make sure you’re fully transparent with employees about which type of survey you’ll be using, and don’t use the terms interchangeably.

A well-built survey tool will include an anonymity threshold. This means that groups below a certain size (3 is an industry standard) can’t be filtered for demographics or other factors, as it would make it easy to connect answers to people. Ensure any survey tool you use has this threshold, particularly if you have small departments or are a smaller company. This will create a higher sense of confidence in your employees and will higher participation and honesty.

Write questions based on your key business drivers. If you want to boost retention,ask questions focusing on the employee’s future at the organization and their promote-ability. If you want to boost performance, ask questions about whether employees have the tools they need to do their job.

Avoid double-barreled questions. Aim to find out about one thing per question. Don’t ask for multiple ideas in one question. For example, this question is problematic: “On a scale of 1 to 5, how well do your managers and teammates communicate?” It’s not clear if the question is asking about how good managers and teammates communicate with each other, or how well they communicate with the survey-taker.

Cut the jargon. Avoid mushy business terms that hide exactly what you’re asking about. For example, “Do you feel your contributions help leverage corporate success?” should be reworked to “Do you feel your work contributes to thecompany’s bottom line?”

1

2

3

“If the business is growing and

evolving, yet the company is not doing anything to

help individuals acquire new skills to do

their job better and faster, eventually

two things will happen. Either that individual

may start to underperform and eventually be rolled out, or that person will disengage

and leave.”

Chris Powell, Talmetrix CEO

8

Q: How do I prepare employees for a survey?

A: Tell employees what you will be asking about, why you’re asking, and what the timeline will be for them to observe the actions taken as a result of their feedback.

Share the topics you’ll be asking about. Not knowing the topics could make employees feel apprehensive, or inspire misinformation. You don’t have to go into extreme detail — simply remind employees that the survey will ask how they feel about work or their working conditions, it will be coming up soon, and that you hope their answers will be candid.

“Reliability, which is aimed at consistency, is why surveys tend to be longer than what some people may prefer. That’s because with surveys, employees can respond with false positives—they’re not necessarily telling you the truth in that scenario, even if it’s anonymous. Talmetrix has built in reliability is so that we can tease out if there are any false positives in how employees respond.”

– Chris Powell, Talmetrix CEO

1

9

Share your goals. If you have data about your current engagement levels and why you need to improve engagement, share it! If you’re simply interested in getting a baseline, let employees know that’s what the survey is for. Tying their feedbackto company goals will also connect their engagement to desired business outcomes.

Give a timeline. Let employees know what they can expect after the surveys. After all, if they’re sharing their deepest thoughts with you, they deserve to know what the next step is. Ideally, you have a timeline for when you will share the results and determine what actions you’ll take. If your timeline changes, be transparent about it. Open communication will go a long way if there are changes or delays.

Make sure they know they are being heard. Trust is easily eroded and hard to earn If you aren’t timely in how you communicate and act on what you’ve learned from your survey, you can end up destroying the trust you’ve been working to build. At minimum, acknowledge what you are asking for, confirm you received it, and share what you are going to do (or not do) with it. Then be sure to thank employees for their opinions.

Q: What should I know about response rates?

A: An acceptable response rate will depend on the size of your company, and the response rate from employees will vary from survey to survey. The best way to get a large amount of responses is to ask about things people feel connected to. Questions about organizational culture tend to get good rates, while things like benefits or facilities get lower rates.

If you get a surprisingly low response rate, look at whether your survey is user-friendly. Is it easy to complete? Is the link to the survey working? If people must jump through hoops to complete it, they might drop out at a higher rate.

If you get a low response rate — such as 250 out of a pool of 1,000 — run a demographics analysis on the respondents to see if it is representative of the group. Even smaller response sizes can be useful.

Be sure to pay attention to response rates over time. If you’re communicating, optimizing the surveys you send, and acting on the results of your feedback—and employees are seeing the benefits to providing feedback—your response rates should remain high or increase.

“Many organizations choose anonymous (or confidential) surveys to encourage employees to give more honest feedback, but it’s important to know that anonymity really gets down to the level of reporting you’re after…The more specific you want to get, the

less anonymity really helps you get there.” —Chris Powell, Talmetrix CEO

2

3

4

Q: How often should I survey employees?

A: Some leaders assume that more surveys are always better, but that’s not necessarily true. The ideal survey cadence will be different for every organization, but here are the guidelines we at Talmetrix follow:

Q: What is survey fatigue and how do I avoid it?

A: As consumers, we’re used to answering a lot of survey questions. Every time we stay in a hotel or call a customer service number, we’re asked to take a survey afterward. When we’re being asked survey questions at work too, we can start to feel overloaded by all the feedback requests — what we call “survey fatigue.” Here are three ways to avoid it:

Watch for drops in participation and response quality. Participation will always vary, but if you start to see a consistent drop over time, or a decrease in how many questions participants answer, employees are probably feeling some fatigue. You can try decreasing survey frequency or reducing the number of questions you ask.

Make sure employees know the goal. The culprit of survey fatigue might not be the actual survey, but the process around it. If employees don’t know why they’re being asked to answer questions or how their answers will be used, they’ll likely shut down. Make sure managers are equipped to share information about the survey goals.

Act on responses. If you run a survey but don’t take any action, employees will likely stop completing the surveys knowing just how critical it is, keep employees in the loop about survey results and your action plans.

1

“Employees are

responsible for their

own engagement.

At some point, it’s

opt in or

opt out.”

Chris Powell, Talmetrix CEO

8

Think of the annualsurvey as the yearly checkup. Use your

longest, once- a-year survey to measure vital signs of the

organization. Then, use shorter surveys

throughout the year to focus on more timely or

specific issues.

Keep employees’workload in mind. Yoursurveying cadence will

depend on what’sgoing on in the business.If everyone is overloaded

with extra work duringa busy season, it’s

probably not a goodtime to roll out a new

survey.

The more frequent yoursurveys, the shorter theyshould be. If you choose

a frequent surveyschedule, keep themto a few questions.

Reserve longer surveysfor twice-a-year or

yearly sessions.

1 2 3

1

2

3

10

11

Section 3: Using Your ResultsYou started the process by and planning your overall engagement strategy. When do you did this, you thought about what you needed to know and why you needed to know it.

Once you have your survey results, don’t fail to revisit how well your goal matches up with reality. All of that information will go into how you shape your action plan, a critical part of ensuring you’re improving the employee experience. What new insights did you get about your workplace from your survey? That’s what you want to capture.

As you build your action plan, be sure you don’t try to do too much at once. It can be tempting to address all the issues uncovered by your survey, but it’s crucial that you develop an achievable action plan that doesn’t take months to come to fruition. There will be plenty of time to address all the information you got from the survey; follow the process instead of trying to improve everything in one fell swoop. Before you get to that point, you’ll want to start understanding your results.

Understanding Your Survey ResultsQ: What are the different kinds of survey analysis?

A: You’ll hear about three different kinds of analysis:

Trend analysis looks at how your results trend year over year, quarter over quarter, or survey over survey. It’s a look backward and simply establishes whether things are getting better or worse, and whether it’s happening slowly or quickly.

Linkage analysis tries to find correlations between trends. It identifies links between the trends and tracked outcomes (such as turnover or performance). It’s difficult to establish cause and effect in engagement efforts, as it’s unrealistic to set up two identical departments and then run a survey on each to see which kind of manager is more effective, for example, or how different groups of people react to a bad manager. Instead, you’ll look for signals in the data. The more you survey, the more data you’ll have, and the more useful linkage analysis will become.

Predictive analysis looks at your trends and correlations and makes it possible to speculate on what might happen next. You can break results out by department, age, performance levels or other variation, and, by comparing with other trends in the past, make predictions on what might happen in the next quarter or six months.

Remember that you’ll probably get some uncomfortable truths in survey results. There will be people who want to trumpet the “good” results and disown or deny the unfavorable ones, but it’s up to HR to be a fair witness to the truth of the survey.

3

2

1

12

There may be pushback from leaders who don’t want to believe the results, who insist that the survey didn’t include the right questions, or who say the results were affected by a bad quarter. Don’t make the mistake of neglecting to use that data.

Q: What do I need to know about benchmarks?

A: Benchmarking simply means comparing survey results with results from a prior survey, another time, location or even another company. Benchmarking can be useful if you’re in the dark about what your engagement results mean, or if you’re surprised by your results.

External benchmarks come from other organizations. Choose organizationsthat are like yours in size and industry, and make sure the survey data you’recomparing is relevant and recent.

Consortium benchmarks are often provided by third-party organizations andconsist of compiled benchmarks across an industry. These benchmarks can beuseful to get a handle on engagement results that might be affected by industrybooms or downturns.

Workforce studies are snapshots of a workforce demographic across industries and different-sized companies at a certain point in time. These can prove to be an effective tool to compare to and watch over time.

It’s important to note that benchmarks should just be used as a guide. Every organization is different, and you can’t assume that your results will directly mirror anyone else’s. Consider how your situation is different (survey timing, employee demographics, company strategy, resources, etc.) when you refer to benchmarks.

Using Survey Results to ActQ: After a survey, how do I prioritize action?

A: The results are in! Here are three steps you can take after a survey to keep moving forward.

Break down the results. Focus on efforts and effects. A simple nine-box matrix can help you identify the high-, middle- and low-effort actions you can take to improve engagement and compare them with the high-, middle- and low-impact effects those actions would have. The benchmark would be taking 1-3 areas of opportunity at a time, build an action plan, execute the action plan, and then re-survey to determine the success of the action plan.

Look for the easy wins that will show employees you take their concerns seriously and are willing to make changes now, even as you prepare to approach long-term problems strategically.

1

1

2

3

“Think about your action plan in terms

of effort and impact. Start with low-effort

and high-impact to get the best payoff.

If you take on the tough stuff first, you never make

progress.”—Chris Powell, Talmetrix CEO

13

14

Establish accountability. Assign every action step to a person or team. Show managers how they can take specific actions to boost engagement among their direct reports. Instill a sense of responsibility among everyone that engagement is up to them.

Understand the stakes. When you review the results of an engagement survey, you have a lot of options. Doing nothing is not one of them. That’s why building an action plan is such a critical moment on the road map to engagement. When the organization took the initiative to survey employees, it established an understanding that it would do something with the results. If organizational leaders pull back from action, they disenfranchise employees and risk creating a culture that’s exactly opposite of what they had hoped for.

Remember to stay flexible during the process. You set a goal, but it’s entirely possible the results you’ve gotten send you off into an entirely different direction. Be ready to adjust and modify your approach depending on the results. There’s no doubt that an engagement initiative takes a lot of work.

Getting buy-in from company leaders, writing, and administering a survey and assembling the results aren’t easy. But creating and implementing an engagement action plan — the steps your organization will take to make engagement happen — can seem overwhelming, and it’s where many engagement initiatives fail.

If you find engagement scores are much lower than expected, or your culture needs more work than expected, it’s easy to lose courage and conviction when it’s time to take action. Here are three tips to keep the momentum going and focus on action after an engagement survey.

Q: How do I help employees take responsibility for their own engagement?

A: You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink — and in some ways, that applies to employee engagement as well. After all the surveys, communication, action plans, and changes, what moves the needle on engagement are the decisions made as a cohesive unit between executives, managers, and individual employees. Employees play a vital role in their own engagement, and it’s vital that they understand that.

Of course, sometimes employees aren’t clear about their responsibility toward their own engagement simply because employers don’t communicate it clearly enough. To ensure you’re getting the message across, here are three main messages you should focus on.

You are responsible. Employees are responsible for the degree of effort they bring to their work. Leaders and managers can inspire employees, but employees must take that inspiration and use it to motivate themselves.

2

3

1

For example: If an employee survey reveals that employees don’t feel motivated because the leave policy is unreasonable, they never get the time off they want and they feel overworked, changing the leave policy seems like an obvious choice. Employees may then feel engaged because the organization listened, took them seriously, and made a change for the better.

You have a choice. So, what about those employees who don’t feel more motivated even after a change is made? It’s possible that your organization has multiple issues that you uncovered through the survey process. This is why it is critical to slice and dice the data into different segments (age, tenure, job type, geography, etc…) to ensure you address the specific needs of the employees.

Unfortunately, you might simply have employees who aren’t a good fit and are having trouble aligning their own motivations with those of the company. It happens, but it means it’s time for some hard conversations.

Make sure employees understand that the organization can do only so much, and at some point, it’s up to them to step up and either motivate themselves or move on.

Your managers are there to help. Managers are on the front lines of engagement efforts. They can serve as the voice of the organization for employees — and a direct line from employees to the top level. Ensure employees understand the role managers play in engagement, and how managers are often the ones implementing any action plans.

Because managers are so important, it’s essential to empower them to make change happen. It’s not useful to tell employees to work with managers on change initiatives, and then not give managers the tools or autonomy to put those plans into action.

2

3

4

15

“Talmetrix does not offer a one-size-fits-all solution. We are not forced to adapt to a prescribed set of engagement questions, but instead can use a variety of validated or custom survey questions, send unique pulses as needed, or use the social feed-back tool to capture sentiment on a variety of topics. This enables us to quickly adapt our employee feedback needs as they occur. We love the flexibility!”

-Kim C., SHRM-CP, Senior Director,Human Resources, Assurex Health

“Talmetrix has taken the heavy-lifting off my plate and guided me step-by-step through implementing an

employee engagement program. They made the process easy and didn’t force

me to be a software expert.”

-Marcella H., Human Resources Manager, Altair Global

16

Section 4: ConclusionEngagement efforts aren’t a top-down proposition. All employees need to understand their roles for an engagement effort to succeed. Knowing there is an art and science to any engagement initiative, keep these 4 things in mind as you look to improve the employee experience:

1. Be ready for change.

Change during an engagement initiative moves in all directions — across departments, up from the rank-and-file, cascading through different levels. As you empathize with your employees, remember that change elicits all kinds of emotions, some bad and some good. But that’s exactly why you’re asking them questions—and then listening to what they say—early and often.

2. Don’t get overwhelmed.

No matter what you find, you may wonder where you should start making changes — or you may feel that the problem is too great to solve. It may even be tempting to blame others or point fingers in an effort to avoid change. Work to identify the high-, middle- and low-effort actions you can take to improve engagement and compare them with the high-, middle- and low-impact effects those actions would have.

“Change isinevitable in anorganization.”

Chris Powell,Talmetrix, CEO

17

Some companies get fired up about taking on tough issues first and really want to dig in to problems that make take months to resolve. And it’s true, some changes will take longer — but focusing on a long-term problem, no matter the payoff, shouldn’t be your first priority. You know that culture change doesn’t happen overnight, so look for the easy wins that will show employees you take their concerns seriously and are willing to make changes now, even as you prepare to approach long-term problems strategically.

3. Make sure business leaders continue to own the process.

Business leaders must be responsible for putting into action any changes that need to be made in the organization. HR will be there to support them every step of the way, but improving business outcomes isn’t just one disciplines or departments responsibility. Part of that support is in making sure business leaders have the right tools, they know the power and importance of communication, and in helping to manage successful “hand-offs” throughout the journey.

Drive Greater Engagement in Your Organization Through Workforce Insights Identify the drivers of engagement, retention and culture for your organization, and don’t stop there.

From survey building through action planning, Talmertrix powers talent-focused companies to:

- Capture unique and meaningful employee insights- Analyze date- Take informed action- Achieve organization growth

18

"Stop Guessing, Start Knowing."

Chris Powell, Talmetrix, CEO

19

Talmetrix offers:A configurable platform built to be flexible as your organization grows

Fast and easy implementation created based on HR business leaders’ needs

Dedicated support committed to your success

Expert action planning provided by Solutions Advisors that support you on the most critical parts of your journey

Still have questions? Contact our Talmetrix team.

Click Here to Contact Talmetrix

Email the Solutions Advisor team at info@talmetrix.com Call the Solutions Advisor team at (513) 399-6301