Annual or Every Other Year? Why Annual Engagement Surveys Boost Accountability and Progress

Recently, I was talking with a Ministry Partner who is committed to workplace health but unsure of the value of an annual Employee Engagement Survey.

When they received their customized survey report, they took the time to review the data and set action plans to address areas where they wanted to see improvement in workplace health. They felt that waiting two years between surveys would give them more time to implement changes and see the impact of their new initiatives.

Are they right? What is the best practice for how long to wait between Employee Engagement Surveys?

Questions about survey frequency highlight the importance of understanding how and why to incorporate staff feedback into your organization’s strategic planning process.

Rather than deciding to survey less frequently in the hopes of accomplishing more, Best Christian Workplaces recommends setting annual engagement goals that reflect a year’s worth of realistic and faithful progress.

Laura Gardner, President of Joni and Friends, reflected on why they continue to assess culture every year, even in a healthy workplace:

Even after 17 years of surveying, as a mature culture, we still must embrace a relentless commitment to listening, to learning, to adapting, and to growing. Every new generation of employees will have their own set of desires and expectations. And if we want to create a healthy environment for all generations, we need to go on an annual endeavor to listen to them, to learn from them, to adapt, to grow, and to continue to build on that strong foundation of culture. [From Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast]

Joni and Friends and hundreds of other Ministry Partners who are committed to workplace health understand the benefits of regular, annual assessment.

Key Benefits of Annual Assessment

Accountability

Committing to a cycle of annual measurement of employee engagement and workplace health demonstrates to your staff that your leadership team takes their honest input seriously and wants to move toward flourishing.

In the demands of day-to-day operations, the goals that are part of your post-survey action plan can slip in priority, especially if measurement of your progress toward that goal is more than a year in the future.

You show your staff that you are accountable and can be trusted when you share survey results, incorporate their feedback into concrete action plans that can be reasonably accomplished within the coming year, and then visibly implement steps toward improvement. The more time that goes by between staff giving feedback and practical action and results being realized, the less your staff will feel that their feedback was listened to or acted on. Engaged staff have a strong need to feel heard and valued and that their suggestions are acted upon in a reasonable timeframe.  

Affirmation of Progress

Once you have determined action items based on your Employee Engagement Survey and implemented changes, your staff and leadership team will want to know if there have been measurable improvements. Waiting too long between surveys can dilute the energy, enthusiasm, and momentum for progress. Annual survey results showing that specific changes have resulted in improved health are motivating for your leadership team and staff to continue moving along on the journey.

Also, more frequent feedback will help you understand if you need to make changes to your plan. If you wait more than a year to see if your action steps are working, you may be wasting efforts and/or delaying making true progress on workplace health.

Keeping on Top of the Pace of Change

Your organization is continually facing internal and external changes. Your culture is not static; it is always in flux as you experience and process both planned and unexpected events.

Every staffing change, new process, or structural change has an impact on employee engagement and workplace health. These internal changes can be positive, negative, or neutral. But if you wait two or more years between surveys, you often won’t be able to isolate and assess the impact of each of the many internal changes that have taken place.

In addition, external pressures such as technology, economic influences, demographic changes, and competition will impact your workplace in ways that you can’t necessarily foresee. Even though you can’t control external pressures, the more data-driven information you have about how your staff are being impacted by them, the better able you are to respond to those external changes.

The bottom line is that more frequent surveying provides the ability to re-direct and respond to changes and to see if internal or external changes are causing significant disruption to your staff.

What’s Realistic for Annual Goals?

An annual survey is most useful if the research-based results from the survey fold into the cycle of your strategic planning, including developing your annual goals and budgets. This makes the action planning from survey feedback more realistic and moves ideas to practical implementation. Goals based on a survey assessment need to be tied to the time, money, people, and other resources essential for achieving progress. So, it’s important to build engagement-related goals into your annual strategic plan and budget.

An annual survey cycle can become discouraging if the goals from the previous year were overly ambitious and didn’t result in improvement. By setting realistic goals that represent a year’s worth of faithful progress, your team can see improvement and set up momentum for ongoing growth.

For example, if you notice in your survey results that supervisors are not having regular meetings with their employees, then training on how to have an effective and regular 1-on-1 meeting can result in a noticeable improvement in engagement in a short period of time. Also, if employees feel that compensation and benefits are an issue, you can start to address this with improved communication about the actual value of benefits that you offer since employees may not be aware of the full picture of compensation. Look for simple changes that impact your engagement, even as you continue to work on larger issues.

Dr. John Reynolds, President of L.A. Pacific University, describes how the survey folds into their annual planning process:

Five years ago, our leadership team committed to having an external assessment on a consistent basis. In November of every year, we engage Best Christian Workplaces to help us to move through that. We measure where we are based on where we've been and where we want to be in the future.

The Employee Engagement Survey became a codified goal for our annual management plan. The people interventions we commit to in our next fiscal year are founded on the results of our last survey and combined with what I do every year as a president—a listening tour with the organization. [From Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast]

Even as you set realistic goals for improving the health of your workplace, you can still keep your eye on longer-term issues that might take several years to show measurable improvement. The road to a flourishing workplace is an ongoing commitment to work on culture and employee engagement, one year at a time.

Consider Even More Frequent Assessment—Pulse Survey

Best Christian Workplaces also offers a “Pulse Survey,” which is short and focused on the particular areas you’ve recently been working on and thus want to measure. It’s often used about six months after a full Employee Engagement Survey. If you’ve been working on a particular FLOURISH Factor, such as Healthy Communication or Uplifting Growth, your Pulse Survey can be customized to include questions related to your area of emphasis. The Pulse Survey uses questions from our research-based Employee Engagement Survey so your results can be compared to your previous outcomes and peer group rankings.

A Pulse Survey provides great feedback to measure the impact of the actions you’ve been taking toward your annual engagement goals. You will find out how well your efforts are working. A Pulse Survey can help you redirect your efforts in a timely manner or embolden you to continue moving forward with your current plan.

Next Steps

While it may take several years to see significant gains in workplace health, the steady attention to annual assessment and follow-up with realistic plans and concrete action items will move your workplace toward flourishing.

Start with a commitment to an annual Employee Engagement Survey. Your Best Christian Workplaces consultant will provide your results in a customized report and debrief your leadership team. Then, they will walk alongside you to provide resources that help you create a realistic action plan to address areas your team wants to focus on first. As you use research-based results to incorporate goals related to workplace health in your annual planning cycle, you will build momentum toward workplace health.

If you’re already surveying annually and have taken on a specific area of emphasis in the past few months, consider a mid-year Pulse Survey to assess progress on specific aspects of employee engagement.

Start now with a commitment to annual surveying on your road to flourishing. As you experience improved employee engagement, you will find that a healthy workplace leads to enhanced mission accomplishment, whether you are a ministry or marketplace business.