What not to do Part 1
Employee engagement and culture survey tools are a great way to invite and collate feedback from your employees in a meaningful way. The insights generated from this collection of data is useful not only to quickly gauge team and employee sentiment but also to empower leaders and organisations to identify where and how they can improve.
The more transparent and action oriented the engagement tool, the better the outcomes, given transparency builds trust and actions naturally propel us forward.
Whilst these tools are a game changer to how we design, measure and manage workplace culture, there are some potential pitfalls that leaders need to be aware of. Even the very best leaders can easily become caught up in one or more of these challenging scenarios. The good news is that with a bit of troubleshooting and practice, we can overcome pitfalls.
Feedback that disappears into the metaverse
This is the most common and detrimental pitfall. There is nothing worse than asking for feedback and for the organisation and leader to never make mention of the survey or results again. Without the right follow up to discuss results, you can be sure to erode trust. Employees naturally perceive the organisation and leader don’t take workplace culture improvement seriously. This also applies to inconsistent engagement with your culture tool by leaders. The end result? Overtime response rates drop, productivity may also drop and you may even notice an increase in staff turnover.
Missed opportunity: The aim of most culture tools is to promote productive and focused team conversations. These discussions generate new questions, insights and ideas. It’s predicted that bringing teams together regularly to brainstorm enhances the sense of connection, improving engagement and morale.
Practice: scheduling team meetings in advance as a show of commitment to prioritise, share and follow up on feedback as a way to build trust and team rituals.
Score tunnel vision
Setting goals and utilising your culture tool as a mechanism to measure your progress is a great way to help you and your team stay on track and drive continuous improvement. While culture and engagement tools are designed for leaders to pay close attention to survey scores, it can sometimes cause leaders to have tunnel vision which in turn can create some unintended behaviours.
Missed opportunity: If you’re focused on simply attaining a particular score then you are at risk of missing the point of employee engagement. Culture tools should encourage leaders, teams and organisations to think deeply about what the team wants to achieve together and how they will get there.
Practice: Nurture what’s in your control by prioritising productive team conversations. Through productive and genuine conversations and follow through on actions, scores will naturally follow.
Hopefully we’ve given you some ideas that you can implement today ! And if a culture tool is on your list of ideas, speak to us about PQfactor, our thriving cultures tool powered by Teamgage! Look out for part 2 coming your way soon!
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