Employee attention is essential to growing your business.

One of the most standard ways to increase participation is to conduct a survey.

However, it is not enough to take one and get the answers. You need to be able to analyze them properly. The survey results should significantly impact the business because they can show the weaknesses and strengths of your business.

Few companies are willing to comprehensively analyze the results of employee surveys to determine what is most important to attract, develop, and retain the best employees. After analyzing the results, companies often dwell on single changes to their weaknesses.

But this approach seems outdated. It won’t produce the results you expect. It would help if you did a more sophisticated analysis of the data. 

Why is it challenging to analyze the results?

Even with the most effective and relevant survey, you may not be able to assess the results adequately. It could be due to several reasons. Your survey may have been too difficult for employees. For example, it had too many questions. It impairs employees’ ability to provide complete and detailed answers to inquiries, making it difficult for the employer to analyze those answers.  

What strategies should you employ to quickly and effectively analyze your survey results?

1. Conduct the proper surveys.

As we have said, if an employer survey has too many questions or addresses too many different topics simultaneously, it can be challenging to analyze and draw conclusions from the survey. Also, conducting an employee survey too infrequently, such as once a year, may not give you a complete picture of how your employees feel about working with you. Therefore, conducting shorter surveys more often will achieve more effective results.

The key to gathering valuable data from employees will be the right and precise questions, based on which you can then act and improve your interactions with them.

Review your past surveys and use what you’ve learned to shape new questions. You can ask yourself:

– What went wrong last time? 

– How to proceed more effectively this time? 

– Are there questions that should be repeated? 

– Are there questions that shouldn’t be used anymore?

2. Classify the results.

Each of your employees will have a different individual experience with you. Therefore, classifying your responses will be a significant part of effectively analyzing your survey results. It would be best if you categorized employees into different groups, depending on the department they work in, because each department’s claims or level of dissatisfaction may differ.

You can analyze how your teams perform and understand why some are doing better than others. Or perhaps someone is dissatisfied with just the numbers in the paystub or the need to request it from you. For others, it may not be determinative. 

With this advice in mind, add questions about gender, age, and the department where the employee works. Surveys are still advisable to be done anonymously, as the person may be afraid it will affect their pay stub. You should also explain why you need the information and ensure that anonymity is maintained.

3. Compare survey results

Benchmarking your survey results will help you understand how your company is performing and identify its problems and areas that need improvement.

You can use three indicators: national, industry, and internal.

• National Indicators.

These are comparisons to national averages. It will give you an understanding of how your company is doing nationally. These metrics will be able to get your business to the companies with the best levels of these metrics.

• Industry Performance

Industry-specific tests show how you perform compared to other similar companies. It takes into account factors specific to your industry. These indicators are more reliable because they are more individualized.

• Internal Indicators

These are some of the essential measures of survey performance. These indicators allow you to monitor the trend of improving or deteriorating company performance.

This type of data tracks the progress of your business and makes improvements.

4. Pay attention to qualitative answers.

Yes, numbers are essential. However, paying attention to qualitative responses is equally important to supplement the quantitative data you receive and ensure that you don’t miss anything important. Qualitative data can reflect an employee’s motivation, thoughts, and attitude.  

Without context, numerical responses can be unreliable because they don’t consider extraneous factors. 

A common problem with anonymous surveys is the inability to get feedback and quality data. By doing so, you miss the opportunity to get more information to clarify grievances or reasons for incomplete employee satisfaction. 

5. Give managers a lot of importance.

Your managers play an essential role in analyzing employee engagement. You should give them enough time and resources to connect with employees and increase their interest in the company’s success.

Allow managers to evaluate the results of the survey within their department. Based on the responses, managers should work within the team to increase the level of engagement among employees.

If you are serious about employee engagement as a core talent management strategy, your managers must share this responsibility. One sure way to get them involved is to hold them accountable for employees’ lack of desire to participate in the firm’s life. Employee engagement is a significant indicator of managers’ performance that can affect their raises or bonuses. 

To analyze management performance, add questions to your survey about managers’ interactions with the team throughout the year.

6. Share the success of the company

Your job is to keep employees willing to participate in the company’s life. It is only possible if they become part of its success. Employee engagement can become a sustainable part of your company culture when you make this an ongoing discussion.  

Your ultimate goal in conducting any employee survey analysis is to determine what other actions you should take to increase employee engagement at the company. After completing a sound analysis, your next step should be to create an action plan.

Even if you’re not happy with the results, reporting them and providing transparency to the business is still essential. Instead of playing the blame game, identify why problems are occurring and focus on finding a solution.