Keeping employees engaged helps to boost productivity and encourage worker longevity. Smart business leaders and skilled HR professionals know that giving employees the opportunity to provide feedback makes workers happier, which in turn makes them more effective and more likely to stay with your organization for the long haul.  Employee engagement surveys are one tool that is used in assessing employee happiness and making improvements to workplace policies.

Unfortunately, employee engagement surveys are not always the most effective way to assess what changes need to be made or how engaged your workers are. While engagement surveys can provide important feedback, these common mistakes can have an adverse impact on the value of your employee engagement research:

• Assuming all responses to employee engagement surveys deserve equal weight: Surveys are submitted anonymously, so it can be difficult to decide whether some replies are more credible than others. The reality is that anonymous surveys do not always produce valuable insights from every worker. Responses need to be considered carefully to determine if it makes sense for your organization to act on what the employees are asking for.
• Assuming that giving employees what they want will always result in more engagement. There is no such thing as the perfect workplace, and even giving employees everything they ask for is not a guarantee that the workers will be truly engaged in their job tasks. Fulfilling the requests employees make on engagement surveys is just one of many parts of effective human resources management that top-HR professionals need to take on.
• Focusing too much on engagement at the expense of accountability. Good HR leaders are going to be able to develop a careful balance between working on keeping employees engaged and ensuring that employees are accountable.  In too many businesses, the bulk of HR efforts is spent on engagement, while clear standards are never developed and enforced to maximize accountability.

Most people want to be engaged in their job but need the right combination of challenges and motivators to excel.  Allowing engagement surveys to play too large of a role in dictating your policies for interacting with employees is not the most effective way to manage human resources. Engagement surveys need to be conducted carefully, and responses should be measured to ensure you are doing what is right for the organization’s long-term relationship with its most valuable asset: its people.

HR Alliance has the experience necessary to help human resources professionals, CEOs and executives take their HR management to the next level. Contact us today to learn more about how we can assist your business in creating a more engaged workforce.