How to take action with employee engagement survey results

1. Send out your employee engagement surveys

Before you can start turning your employee survey results into action, you must administer your surveys.

Most HR departments run surveys frequently. They might send them out weekly, monthly, or quarterly. To avoid survey fatigue, try to balance survey length and frequency; the more infrequent the survey, the more questions you can include, and vice versa.

For higher completion rates, ensure employees know when to expect a survey and send reminders to prompt them to complete it.

Remember: The strongest motivator for employee participation is a culture of acting on employee survey results. No matter how many reminders you send out, no one wants to spend time completing a survey if they think the results will be ignored.
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2. Gather the employee survey results in a central place

How are you currently running employee engagement surveys? Are you using a mix of software and documents, or even administering surveys on paper? Having employee survey results scattered in different places can lead to confusion and make it more difficult to analyze the data you gather.

To stay organized and make employee engagement analysis faster, it’s useful to have a “single source of truth” for your employee survey results. With a people management platform, you can manage your survey process in one place — alongside other critical HR functions like performance management, OKRs, and learning.

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3. Interpret your quantitative data

You'll have access to two types of data in your employee survey analysis: quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative data can be expressed through numbers or metrics, while qualitative data consists of more subjective, long-form answers.

The employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) is a commonly tracked quantitative metric. Net Promoter Score is a widely used measure for tracking customer satisfaction, and eNPS applies the same metric for employee satisfaction.

You can find your eNPS using just one survey question: “On a scale of 0–10, how likely would you be to recommend our organization to a friend or colleague?” Employees may be classified as detractors (0–6), passives (7–8), or promoters (9–10), depending on the scores they give. To calculate your eNPS score, subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. You can also easily measure eNPS with Leapsome’s employee survey analytics.

To better understand your quantitative data, try filtering and segmenting it — for example, by age, gender, team, or job title. With Leapsome, you can also verify other companies’ benchmarks.
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4. Interpret your qualitative data

Qualitative data is a bit more complex to analyze. When looking at someone’s long-form answer, you may be unsure what they mean by their comments. While you could ask them to elaborate in an in-person conversation, this can be difficult with anonymous surveys.

Fortunately, Leapsome lets you easily contact employee survey respondents and engage in anonymous talks.

Sentiment analysis can also help you analyze qualitative data at scale. This natural language processing (NLP) technique (which you’ll find in Leapsome!) can help you digest and visualize information by grouping comments into categories and classifying them as positive, negative, or neutral.
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5. Identify key themes & brainstorm ideas

The next step is to look at the “big picture” of your engagement survey results. Your qualitative and quantitative analyses should have revealed key points to focus on. Once you’ve identified your company’s strengths and weaknesses, brainstorm how these might translate into an action plan.

For example, if most employees gave low scores on the statement “my manager cares about my opinions,” you could consider setting up a managerial training program. Or if the statement “I have access to the equipment and tools I need to do my job” received a low score, perhaps it’s time to upgrade your technology and infrastructure.

The ideas you come up with during this brainstorming will serve as a foundation for your action plan.‍
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6. Create an action plan for the future‍

It’s time to create an action plan and decide how to move forward. This is where you’ll choose the most important points to focus on and outline the specific steps you’ll take to reach your goals.

Lay out your action plan in writing and include regular checkpoints and deadlines for accountability. Leapsome allows you to create this type of post-survey plan and assign ownership of specific projects, making it easy to keep track of your progress along the way.

To keep employees at all company levels engaged and involved, avoid simply issuing decrees from above. Consider also offering ways for employees to create change from the bottom up. For example, many companies have created working groups where employees can discuss DEI issues, express concerns, and plan future actions.
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7. Share the action plan with stakeholders

Once you’ve analyzed the data, understood it, and created your action plan, it’s time to share the survey results with your company's employees.

Decide who needs to see the survey results, data visualizations, and action plan — as well as and how they should be presented. Employee survey results should always be discussed with managers, and we recommend that you share them with employees as well (especially if you’re planning to make big changes).

You can share employee survey results at an all-hands meeting and follow up via email, recapping the action plan from the previous round and the results. 

“Do an AMA [Ask Me Anything] in your all-hands meeting and get the founder up there to discuss structural changes. Get people to ask them questions in advance.

Be able to come and be vulnerable about what you’re doing, what you’re working on, and what these changes will mean in practice, and why you believe they’re important. Show that you actually care.”

— Matt Bradburn, co-founder of The People Collective, offering his insights on how to act on employee engagement survey results on the People Over Perks podcast

Follow-up best practices for employee survey results

Keep track of medium- & long-term goals

Employee survey results should guide the direction of your company culture over the long term.

When turning survey results into action, you may encounter goals that you can’t act upon immediately — but these long-term objectives should be integrated into your company’s overall OKRs or goal-planning framework. That way, stakeholders can hold one another accountable for making things happen.
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⭐️ Don’t know where to start with employee engagement surveys? Check out this free list of 72 best-practice questions in 22 categories, complete with an infographic and a downloadable resource to make things even easier. 😉

Make the most of survey results with Leapsome

A challenging economic climate shouldn’t stop you from investing in employee engagement — much on the contrary! In times like these, it can be tough to encourage employees to complete surveys when they’re so used to inaction. That’s why Leapsome gives you the tools to demonstrate to everyone exactly how you plan to put their feedback to use.

Our people enablement platform allows you to create a well-oiled engagement survey cycle, complete with AI-powered survey analytics and actionable insights into how your employees feel at work. 

Watch this video to learn how Leapsome can help you build a better employee feedback loop.‍
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💪 Future-proof your engagement strategy with AI-powered surveys

Automate your survey cycle with Leapsome and get access to in-depth analytics and personalized action plans so you can execute your strategy with greater agility.

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