Game-changing employee experience lies at the root of every successful organization. You can't win in the marketplace if you don't win in the workplace. This means measuring employee engagement across key drivers like belonging, empowerment, inspiration and enablement.

For decades, companies have gathered employee feedback through surveys. Employees are asked to answer dozens of questions quarterly or annually. Despite a growing set of tools and technology, however, many organizations have not evolved their employee listening. The use of traditional instruments is not leading to long-term and significantly improved engagement—Gallup reports that just 34 percent of U.S. employees are engaged. Often surveys feel obligatory, instead of a tool that empowers employees to co-create a better, more productive and balanced workplace.

As we review the efficacy of employee surveys and continue to elevate EX in the coming year, here's how business leaders can leverage traditional employee surveys to unlock the power of their greatest asset: people.

Improve availability

According to Gallup, only 36 percent of employees report that they receive surveys regularly—three or more times per year. Surveys distributed through an annual or biannual cadence are less likely to capture timely, thoughtful feedback. Why? Because employees either forget or stop caring about an idea or concern they had weeks or months ago. If they want to report feedback, they shouldn't have to wait for a scheduled survey.

Surveys available on a 24/7 basis enable employees to choose when they want to engage in feedback, ultimately delivering more actionable insights for managers. A great way to make surveys more available is through everyday communication—display a live icon that lives on your intranet homepage or share weekly reminders via email. If employees know the survey is available and where to access it, they are more likely to participate.

The bottom line: better access leads to more organic results.

Take a tailored approach

Many companies use only one approach for completing surveys, which is email to web. Consider how we communicate — we text, video-chat and leverage voice commands with our phones. According to a Deloitte Human Capital Trends report, the average mobile phone user checks their phone an average of 150 times per day. So why don't we use these same channels to increase engagement on employee surveys?

Delivering surveys via mobile is an efficient, practical approach that caters to the entire workforce, not just desk workers. For example, bankers' workdays look drastically different from that of restaurant servers, who may be more inclined to complete a survey on their phones during breaks than logging onto shared desktops in the break room. Surveys that aren't conducive to the job setting result in lower response rates and fewer insights, as only 8% of employees strongly agree that their employer takes action on survey results.

Surveys must be succinct, customized and available in the places that employees frequently visit. Tailoring surveys to seamlessly integrate into the individual's workday can yield stronger results and ensure employees feel heard.

Capture insights to take action

The volume of available data is growing at an unprecedented rate. Survey results are maximized if companies deploy a text-analytics engine that can unlock data and identify themes and categories. Without this, it's challenging to manage the sheer volume of feedback, and the surveys are less likely to drive actionable insights to facilitate change.

If the insights are available, companies typically use them to improve employee experience and impact the bottom-line. A 2017 Medallia-Accenture study of 450 large organizations in North America, Europe, and Australia found that companies that use text analytics to extract insights are 15 percent more likely to innovate based on that feedback.

As a result, employees feel more valued as their feedback is applied, and companies and customers mutually benefit. A global Medallia study of 500 chief human resource officers in 2018 found that 83 percent of organizational leaders emphasized that positive employee experience is crucial to organizational success.

More companies are continuing to elevate employee experience as a core pillar, central to company success, by first identifying the business problem to be solved with the help of an employee survey, then taking action on the results. If employee surveys are accessible, versatile and capture insights, the benefits can reverberate across an entire organization, improving the employee and ultimately the customer experience.

Melissa Arronte is a solutions principal at Medallia.

Read more:

Instant Insights /

2020: Where traditional employee surveys are falling short

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