Stilettos or Work Boots? Selecting an Engagement Measurement Tool to Fit Your Organization’s Style

Fitting an engagement survey to fit a company’s needs is a bit like selecting the appropriate shoes. Looking back, there is a memory that gives me quite a chuckle when thinking about "style" fit. I was at a distribution center office in Southern California and sporting open-toed shoes in the beautiful, sunny weather. When I let the site leader know I would be heading out onto the operations floor soon he gasped, "You are not going to wear THOSE shoes on the operations floor, are you?" I responded, "Definitely not—I have a pair of stilettos in the car." It took him a couple of seconds to realize that I was completely kidding and I proceeded to put on the appropriate footwear for the work floor. That definitely would not have been a good style—or safety—fit!

This situation is similar to what some companies do when selecting an employee engagement survey provider. They may select a tool that they see as stylish but it may not be a good fit for the company’s workforce composition, culture, or leadership ability level if they hope to turn engagement data into actionable results. For example, take a company that is completely new to surveys and needs some guidance on the root causes of low engagement levels in some business areas. If they select a tool in a style that provides broad output—such as one that only indicates signs of whether or not employee engagement exists—then leaders may be left scratching their heads saying, "Now what do I do with this?" The other end of the spectrum can be dangerous as well—providing too much data (aka a data dump) without providing indices can render it useless and fail to establish themes. To select the optimal style of survey and vendor, a proper assessment of the your company’s culture, level of buy-in, and the provider’s experience with employee engagement measurement are all factors to consider.

As part of survey preparation, here are some items to consider prior to selecting a vendor:

• What is the level of executive buy-in? Do executives truly understand what employee engagement and satisfaction is and how to help their leaders fully leverage employee engagement? If the team is new to the idea, gaining buy-in and educating them is important to ensure positive results can be attained as a result of the process.

• What are the goals of the survey? Are they just looking for a high level identification of engagement health or are they looking for more depth in the data? If depth, then creating indices may be useful. Comparing the data to quality benchmark data can also be helpful.

• What cultural elements exist that can help or hinder your employee engagement efforts? For example, is there a desire to continuously improve? If so, the initiative should be met with openness among the employee base. On the other hand, if there is a lack of trust with a strong "us versus them" mentality between executives and the frontlines, then be careful on how you approach the survey and make sure to pay special attention to the follow-up. Also, you may not want to utilize unique identifiers before more trust is developed (unique identifiers are used in surveys to automatically identify the demographics and business area of a person, based on a unique code provided by the survey vendor).

• What is the level of partnering between HR and frontline leaders? If leaders consistently avoid people-related initiatives with the age ol’ excuse"I don’t have time for this," then you may be fighting an uphill battle for attaining good response rate numbers and facing difficulty when trying to partner with leaders to create quality action plans.

Styles of employee engagement measurement vendors can be grouped into four categories:

• Stilettos: Specialized firms that have a niche approach to how they approach the survey process. This includes companies such as Gallup and the Best Places to Work Institute. On the positive side, these firms have a wealth of knowledge of employee engagement and survey analytics. On the other hand, there is usually less flexibility to customize the survey if your company has some very specific needs that the out-of-box version doesn’t offer.

• Functional, but Stylish Work Shoes: Firms that focus on partnering with a company to develop a survey approach and analytics that fit firms specific needs. These include Spring International and the Gelfond group. These firms tend to fit well for companies that have a very specific idea of what they want, as well as those who are new to the process and need a tool to fit their culture and specific needs. These firms are not afraid to roll up their sleeves and help companies attain the best fit for their company’s specific needs.

• Wingtips: Firms that offer a variety of services, including employee engagement analytics. These firms include Kenexa and Towers Watson. For this category, the vendor provides a wide range of services. Although there is usually good functionality and the option to integrate with other services available, you will hear professionals in the field comment that they may feel more like a number than a partner when dealing with larger firms due to the volume of customers they support.

• Flip-Flops: Smaller firms that include free surveys, but then make their profits off of consulting services. The results of these surveys can seem more like a data dump than quality analytic material, so be very careful before proceeding with this style of tool. If you do not have strong employee engagement expertise internally, you may be strongly dependent on the external vendor that can drive up costs fairly quickly.

The decisions you make in the planning process impact how well people buy into the idea of measuring employee engagement, the credibility of the process, the quality of output, and how well leaders are able to create an actionable plan. The style of the firm can make or break your success… in more ways than one!