The starting point has to be measure where you already are. Ensure that your measurement process is anonymous (otherwise employees may not respond honestly, which makes the results meaningless) and that you are measuring Employee Alignment, Employee Commitment/Loyalty, Employee Satisfaction and Employee Performance. Your assessment tool needs to be valid and reliable and should be benchmarked against other businesses in your country (you are all competing for the same labour, so you need to see how your business actually compares to others).
It is brave for employees to say how they feel and propose solutions for improvement. It is also a brave business owner who accepts that feedback and leads and embraces change to improve their business performance. These days it is impossible for a business owner to know everything about everything, and getting input from people who are more familiar with specific tasks and processes can only lead to business improvement. Update all employees on the survey results and work with them to build and implement an annual HR Plan to address any key items for improvement that surface.
Conversely, if you are not prepared to share the results with employees and work with them to implement strategies to positively address any areas of concern, we would encourage you not to start. Where owners and/or managers choose not to share all the results with employees and/or decide to develop their own plan in isolation and/or ignore the results because they don’t agree with them, any actions are likely to be less effective and any future survey would normally have much poorer results.
Once you have measured where your business is, work with managers, supervisors and employees and build a plan to close out the agreed and prioritised gaps. This HR Plan should form part of your Business Plan, and would normally extend across at least a period of 12 months. Be assured, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and building employee engagement and alignment also takes time, structure and process.
Download the Employee Satisfaction Doesn’t Mean Profit White Paper if:
- You are a business owner keen to maximise your business performance and profitability
- You are responsible for the people aspects in your business and you want to improve the business outcomes
- You have invested heavily in employee satisfaction initiatives and now want to generate a greater return for the business
