Employee Engagement Surveys are a trusted method to take temperature checks of your employees’ engagement. However you normally only undertake these surveys once per year and can you really afford to wait this long to get reliable information on your employees engagement? ResourceBank undertakes real-time employee engagement reports on a monthly basis, which provide our clients with valuable and up to date information, allowing them to address challenges immediately and track engagement levels throughout their business. If you’re interested in adopting a monthly engagement model here are our five key suggestions for you to consider;
1. Ask your leavers.
Surveying your employee engagement once per year, gives a general view on how people are feeling. It will highlight topics, typically those that are present at the front of peoples minds and in the main most recent. But what happens to some those topics that have got lost or pushed to the back of your employees mind? These will not have gone away and ultimately could be what is driving your employee to look for alternative employment or worst of all – leave your company. Exit interviews establish all of the facts in black and white and allow you to combine the data and feedback with your employee engagement surveys so that you can address the longstanding (sometimes temporarily forgotten) and new issues your employees face. This could make the difference between losing just one individual or a whole team of talent.
2. Talk to your employees, don’t get them ticking boxes
The majority of all employee engagement surveys are conducted online and usually sent via email. Most companies aim to achieve a 80-85% response rate, however if you achieve a 70% response rate then you are doing well. The problem with surveys is exactly that – they are just a survey with a set of pre-defined questions where employees will exert a level of caution around what they write and share, even though they are ‘anonymous’. Typically Exit Interviews are conducted in the same way and again, if there is an opportunity to write something then people tend to be extremely guarded. When it comes to response rates, you are doing well if you manage to achieve 25%. This is why the ResourceBank Exit Interview service is conducted individually using the telephone by a team of trained and qualified HR professionals who talk to your leavers confidentially, gaining far more information than an online survey. The output for you will be qualitative feedback to help you understand the key issues of your employees.
3. The value of an impartial ear
If you undertake exit interviews internally, typically an HR member or a senior Line Manager will call the leaver and run through some pre-defined questions. Both parties feel a little uncomfortable with the whole experience and your leaver is more concerned with getting a good reference rather than sharing their honest views. An impartial ear demonstrates to your departing employee that, you as a company take their feedback seriously and allow them to feel comfortable sharing their real views. Now the added benefit is, once they have discussed their feedback (and sometimes frustrations!) with a professional third party they are less likely to head to Glassdoor (or any other social media platform) to share their views with the potential talent you are trying to attract.
4. Offer interviews at evenings and weekends
Don’t allow the exit interview to impact your departing employee’s productivity. Quite often your employee wont want to talk about their experiences and reasons for leaving whilst at work anyway. We will arrange with your employee to agree a mutually suitable time to conduct the exit interview, away from the office/shop floor which will improve the quality of the interview and feedback obtained. Our team work seven days a week across a working window of 7am till 9pm which allows us to increase your response rate and feedback.
5. Act on the feedback
So, your exit interviews have been completed. What will you do with them now? If the interviews are conducted well, using experienced interviewers with open and probing questioning techniques then you will have a lot of important data and feedback. However, without access to a CRM or reporting tool, sorting, storing and analysing the information becomes an extremely time consuming and costly exercise for your internal resources. At ResourceBank we use a combined CRM and reporting tool that produces real time reports and allows our dedicated team of HR professionals to review interview feedback and flag any potential ER issues within a 24-48 hour time period. This allows our clients to take action and proactively manage any grievance cases that may be arising.
We hope these five suggestions will help you to consider developing your own monthly employee engagement process.
If you would like to know more about our services then please visit https://old.resourcebank.co.uk/solutions/hr-solutions/exit-interviews/
