Congratulations! By using Officevibe to measure and track employee engagement, you’ve taken a positive step towards improving your employee’s experience and building a better agency for your employees to work for (and your clients to work with). You’ve given your employees a voice and enabled them to help you to build a better place to work.
But implementing Officevibe is just the first step.
You’re already aware that you will need to use Officevibe to listen to what your employees are saying and act on the insight / suggestions. But that’s not all.
To get the most out of your investment, here are five other things to think about…
1. Build your team of employee experience advocates
Who has overall ownership of the employee experience?
Who is accountable for acting on the insight and improving engagement?
Who is responsible for the related regular tasks such as:
- reporting on the scores and comments;
- digging deeper into the data, spotting trends, and drawing insight;
- recommending, researching, and implementing changes;
- monitoring participation rates;
- responding to comments and escalating issues as appropriate;
- communicating changes to the team?
When you look at it like this, investing in employee engagement may involve more work than you accounted for, so building a team of advocates can help. But who should form part of this team?
Ownership
To make sure employee engagement is taken seriously at the boardroom level, we recommend that the most senior person in the agency takes ownership of the employee experience. To hold themself and their team accountable for delivering the vision of a highly engaged workforce and all the benefits that that can bring to the agency.
Accountability and responsibility
Given all the other responsibility that comes with running a successful agency, it makes sense to identify other resource(s) to be accountable for improving engagement and responsible for the regular tasks. This could be another member of the leadership team; a member of the wider team with a passion for building a great place to work; or maybe even an external agency partner (#JustSaying ?)
2. Establish good habits from the start
Whoever you identify as being part of your team of advocates, it’s likely that employee experience is only one of many responsibilities they have in their role. So, establishing good habits from the start can make sure your investment in Officevibe delivers the desired improvements.
2.1 Make time for employee engagement
Blocking out time in their calendar, setting up reminders and diarising regular meetings will help to keep everyone on the team on track and using their time to focus on the right things.
How much time and how frequently?
That depends on you and your team, but we recommend:
- Daily tasks – Someone should review and respond to comments. (See 2.3 below.)
- Weekly tasks – Collectively, the team should make progress on proposed changes. (See 2.2 below.)
- Monthly tasks –
- Someone should review and report on the data – identifying any trends/insight and recommending changes.
- The team should get together to review this report, learn from the insight and agree on the next steps.
- Someone should monitor participation rates and speak to any team members not participating about the importance of their contribution.
- Someone should communicate the insight and progress to all employees. (See 2.3 below.)
2.2 Focus on implementing change, not creating fancy reports
Officevibe is great for monitoring and tracking employee engagement. But if you don’t make any changes in light of what your employees are saying, the data isn’t going to change. Well, not for the better at least!
When you first get access to the data, it’s easy to focus on the scores, how they compare, where they rank, whether they meet expectations. But you’ve invested in this tool as a commitment to implement change, not just a way to receive data and insight. Rather than focusing on reporting on the data or analysing trends, focus on using it to inform and drive action.
Remember this: At the heart of every response your employees give in their surveys, they’re all asking for the same thing… action.
- “I’m giving this a low score… I’d like to see changes in this area.”
- “I’m dissatisfied with X… improve it.”
- “I like that we do this… do more of it.”
- “There’s a problem with Y… fix it.”
- “We’re great at Z… shout about it.”
Viewing responses this way helps you to focus on the action you’re being asked to take, not the scores themselves.
Tip! We like to use Trello as a way of keeping track of each action and track them through from recommendation to implementation. This way, the whole team can easily see what action is being taken, what progress is being made on each action, and where there are any bottlenecks.
2.3 Communicate regularly
Officevibe enables your employees to talk to you, tell you what they’re feeling, how they’re viewing their experience. But to make your employee engagement activity effective, your employees also need you to communicate with them.
If you don’t ‘close the loop’ and tell employees what you’re learning and – more importantly – what you’re doing about it, you’re missing a big opportunity to build trust with your employees and provide proof that you are both interested in hearing what they have to say and working with them to build a better agency.
This communication can take place in two ways:
Within Officevibe
As mentioned above, we recommend someone reviews and responds to comments left within Officevibe daily. This ensures that follow up conversations take place promptly whilst it’s fresh in the respondent’s mind and anything requiring urgent attention can be addressed immediately.
You can also engage in continued conversation by using Officevibe’s custom polls. For example:
- To ask clarifying questions to dig deeper into a specific issue
- To ask follow up questions to discover what your employees’ preferred solution to a situation is
- To ask questions to measure how a change is being received
Outside of Officevibe
We also recommend communicating with your employees outside of Officevibe regularly (we suggest monthly at a minimum, but weekly/fortnightly may work best for your agency). This could be in the form of an all-staff email or an agenda item to your all-team meetings / social events.
Tell your employees what the data is telling you, what insight you’re drawing, what action is being taken, and what the timelines are for change.
Why? This communication provides proof that you’re listening to and learning from your employees and you’re taking the survey findings seriously and acting on insight. In turn, your employees’ trust will increase. They will start to reveal more and more insight because they know you’re taking their experience seriously. So even if some insight, or changes, are only relevant to part of the company there’s value in communicating this to the company as a whole.
3. Don’t read too much into early insight
In the first few weeks, it’s tempting to log in and check your scores every day – we know, we’ve been there! But as exciting as this new insight is, don’t read too much into the scores until you have enough data to be confident in the results. The early days can be full of highs and lows, but once more employees have answered a wider range of questions, we find that scores ‘settle’ and the insight is more representative of reality. Depending on the size of your agency/team it may take a month or two for this to happen. (Although you may wish to wait a little longer before making any major changes just to be sure you don’t invest time and effort on a red herring.)
Even a few months in, you may find that your employees are still holding a few things back and not being entirely truthful. This will come with time… and trust. Which is why it’s so important to build good communication habits to provide proof that you’re listening to your employees and making changes as a result of employee feedback.
4. Don’t obsess over chasing higher employee engagement metrics
Remember that employee engagement scores are a by-product of improving your agency, not the aim of the game. Use them to guide you, to show you where improvements can be made, but don’t forget the wider picture.
It’s all too easy to focus on your lowest scores and introduce change after change to try to improve the score – again, we know, we’ve been there! But in doing that you can easily overlook what you’re doing well and miss the opportunity to introduce changes here to do even better. And doing ‘good’ things better may be more valuable to your employees than fixing ‘average’ things.
By all means, measure employee engagement, but don’t invest in quick fixes simply to chase higher engagement scores. Invest your time, and effort, in changes that address the heart of the real issues and see engagement increase as a result.
5. Lead by example
When you first incorporate Officevibe into your employee experience activity, it can feel novel. You’re being exposed to insight and feedback you may not have been aware of before. It’s exciting to receive this data, to learn more about your employee’s experience, to plan and implement change.
But in our experience, the novelty wears off. Maybe all the feedback starts to seem the same, maybe you’re not seeing improvements in key metrics despite changes being made, maybe participation rates are dropping.
With employee engagement likely being only part of the team’s job role, in this situation, it’s easy for conflicting priorities and other responsibilities to cause employee experience tasks to take a back seat. This makes progress slow and sporadic, means that key metrics are even less likely to improve, and can have a knock-on effect that employees completing the pulse survey no longer make it a priority for them.
As the employee experience owner, it’s up to you to set a good example to everyone by showing them that employee experience is a priority for you. In turn, your team will confidently make it a priority for them too. Hold yourself and your team accountable for making change and progress.
Don’t let your other work take over and distract you from attending meetings, having conversations, and making progress. If you’re unable to make employee experience a priority for a while, delegate your ownership to someone who can. Don’t be a bottleneck for progress.
In conclusion
Implementing Officevibe to measure and track employee engagement, is a great step forward to improving your agency. But it’s only the first step. Improving your employees’ experience takes time and effort on your part. Not just by listening to and acting on the feedback – that’s taken as read. But also by building a team of advocates, establishing good habits from the start, making employee experience a priority; delivering action and change; and engaging in two-way communication.
Above all else, leading by example is crucial to making sure that everyone working in your agency knows how serious you are about making it a better place to work. That you’re not just chasing better employee engagement scores. That you’re interested in learning more about, and improving, the employee experience as a whole.
Any thoughts? Is there anything I’ve missed? Anything you did when you implemented Officevibe that you recommend everyone else think about too? I’d love to hear your feedback, ideas, and experience in the comments below.
Interested in learning more about how Ferris Wheel People Experience Agency can help you?
We specialise in embedding a Communicate > Listen > Understand > Act mindset in agencies to help them understand and improve their employees’ experiences. If you’d like to learn more, get in touch today.
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