How Do You Announce Employee Survey Results?

What Is the Importance of Internal Communication?

Most employers recognize the importance of giving their employees a voice and welcoming their feedback. For many, however, the logistics of employee survey distribution can feel difficult, especially if your employees don’t spend a lot—if any—time sitting at a desk, actively checking their email. Yet, even in industries with non-desk based workers, such as manufacturing, construction, or transportation and warehousing, understanding the employee experience is essential to effective management. 

While there are plenty of survey distribution platforms out there for delivering surveys to employees, it’s worth noting that an employee survey is only as useful as it is actionable. In other words, employee surveys are, frankly, a waste of time if you’re not acknowledging and acting on the feedback received. 

So, what are the keys to effectively surveying employees? In this blog, we’re going to outline five best practices:

• Setting expectations before sending out an employee survey, so employees know why they’re taking a survey and why their input matters.
• Thanking employees for completing the survey, something simple that makes a giant difference in making employees feel heard and understood.
• Interpreting results and developing an action plan in response to trends in employee feedback.
• Announcing survey results, and discussing them (as well as your action plan) with employees.
• Following up on survey results and providing action plan updates, as needed. 

Let’s take a closer look at each of these best practices and the difference each can make.

Best Practice #1: Why Is Setting Expectations Important?

Especially if your employees spend a majority of their time out on jobsites, as opposed to sitting in front of a desk and checking their email, it’s vital that you respect their time. Sending random surveys without first explaining their purpose, or why their participation matters, is not a great way to drive survey participation. 

Instead, communicate why you’re surveying them. This doesn’t require much detail; consider something simple, like:

• Employees, this week I will be sending you a link to complete a brief survey to better understand your thoughts on the company’s workplace safety policies. Your candid feedback will help influence future decisions by the company’s leadership.

Best Practice #2: Why Thank Employees for Participating?

No matter what industry you’re in, employees want to feel valued and appreciated. That’s why you should always find a way to thank them for their participation, even for something as simple as completing a brief survey. Much like setting expectations, you can thank employees in advance of sending the survey, when you actually send out the survey, or as you receive their responses. It doesn’t take much—consider this post-survey thank you message example:

Thank you for taking the time to complete this survey. Once I’ve had a chance to review the results, we’ll discuss the biggest takeaways, so stay tuned!

Best Practice #3: How Do You Interpret Survey Results and Create an Action Plan?

Arguably the most important component of surveying employees falls squarely on the leader’s shoulders: interpreting survey results and action planning. When it comes to the question of how to interpret employee engagement survey results, start by looking for trends in employees’ responses—as well as any outliers that you might want to think more about.

As trends start coming into focus, you’re ready for action planning. Creating an action plan means:

• Identifying areas for improvement or change
• Prioritizing those areas by urgency or impact
• Setting objectives and timelines for making changes
• Tracking progress over time and re-surveying as needed

Best Practice #4: How Do You Discuss Survey Results in a Constructive Way?

Once you’ve had time to digest the feedback from your employee survey and create an action plan, you’re ready to discuss the results with your team. When thinking through your post employee survey communication, prioritize being clear and minimizing opportunities for misunderstandings.

Here are a few tips around how to communicate engagement survey results to your team in an effective way:

• Thank employees (again) for their participation, and reiterate the purpose of the survey. Focus on what’s in it for them—in other words, how their feedback will be used to improve some aspect of their job role or relationship with the company.
• Present the key insights revealed by the survey responses. Many employees will naturally wonder how many of their coworkers expressed similar perspectives to their own, so it’s worth sharing how the whole workforce responded.
• Solicit additional input from employees, by asking questions like:
• Does anything surprise you about these results?
• Does anyone have important feedback we haven’t addressed yet?
• Does anyone have any new insights to share, or new questions they want to ask?
• Where do you think we should go from here?

Best Practice #5: How Do You Create an Employee Survey Results Action Plan?

All too often, employers will send out a survey, receive the results, and discuss them to some extent—but they don’t go any further. This is unfortunate, since how you follow up and deliver on your employee survey results action plan is what ultimately shows employees that you care about their feedback. Any manager can say “thanks for completing the survey” and even “here’s what I’m going to do,” but not every manager follows through on their word. When that happens, it can undermine employees’ sense of being heard and make them less likely to respond to future employee surveys.

Speaking of future surveys, that’s the final piece of this best practice. By sending out a follow-up survey, you can compare results to the baseline set by previous surveys and gauge actual progress. You can either send the same survey and see how their responses change, or you can create a new survey asking focused follow-up questions geared more around the effectiveness of the action plan. Let some time pass, though, to prevent survey fatigue.

Yourco: Making Employee Surveys and Company Announcements More Accessible for Non-Desk Workers

Yourco’s platform was created to solve the challenges of communicating with non-desk based workers. By using our two-way communication platform, you can deliver surveys to your employees in a way that’s convenient for them. And when you’re ready to share the results, you can send company announcements through the platform as well. Yourco is, simply put, a streamlined and effective way to communicate. 

Want to see the platform in action? Contact us to set up a demo, or try it out for free today!