How to analyse employee engagement survey results

How to analyse your employee survey results

1) Plan your employee survey questions

Before analysing your employee survey data, it’s important to consider the question and response options you’re giving your employees.

By keeping the survey questions relevant to your organisation and ensuring that your employees can understand the questions, you’ll receive better quality data to work from. 

If your employees can see how answering the questions will benefit their day to day, they’re more likely to respond and provide more detail for you to work from.

Ensuring the response options are clear and consistent throughout the survey will help your employees provide more insightful data, so you can make more informed decisions for your teams.

Improve your response rate

2) Segment the employee survey responses

Once you have received enough survey responses, you can start to break up the data.

Segmenting the data helps to identify patterns and trends that might not be visible from first glance. Whilst your organisation might be scoring well overall, some of your teams or locations may not be scoring as highly.

By breaking the data down by team, location or length of service, you can identify specific areas of improvement and make sure the right changes are made for the right people. 

Using segmentation also helps guide the post-survey communications. For example if you’re making changes for a specific team or location, you should keep these in mind when planning your communications to make sure that those groups hear about the changes created for them.

3) Benchmark your employee survey results

Comparing your survey results to industry standards can provide valuable insights into how your organisation is performing compared to others.

With this insight, you can find out which areas of your organisation are performing well and where there might be room for improvement. It can also help you determine more realistic goals for improving employee engagement if you know how other businesses are scoring.

You can also schedule repeating questions to benchmark your results over time and measure how your engagement strategy is impacting your workplace.

How to ask a benchmarked question

4) Identify key themes and insights

The next step is to identify actionable insights and key themes in your survey data.

Start by checking your highest and lowest question scores to prioritise where to action first. 

Making changes in these areas shows your team that their feedback matters. By implementing change to these areas, you can show your teams that their feedback makes a difference. 

Spotting key themes in your data helps to build a picture of how your employees are feeling. If a number of employees have submitted the same response, this will give you the confidence to make data-led decisions and implement change that’s backed by your employees.

When looking at segments, keep in mind any factors that could affect their responses, like targets, annual leave, or organisational changes. This will help you determine if any changes need to be made or if it’s something that will resolve overtime.

With Stribe, you don’t need to sieve through your data to spot the trends. To save time, we pin-point common key phrases within your responses and display them for you. 

5) Create an action plan

Developing an action plan outlining how you will address the themes in your survey data will help you to communicate feedback to your employees. Things to consider including in your plan:

• Timeline
• Assigning responsibilities
• Measurable goals
  

6) Communicate the results and action plan

It’s important to communicate and share your survey results and action plan with your employees.

This is the perfect opportunity to show your teams the value in their feedback and how their responses are being used to create real change.

• Choose key messages you want to communicate to your employees. 
• Be clear and set expectations by explaining timelines, actions and goals.
• Choose the right communication channels to ensure everyone hears the messages – e.g. Teams or Slack, email, notice boards.
• Bring your managers on board and encourage them to spread the word.
• Encourage employees to share their feedback on the survey actions.
• Create an open dialogue with your teams to get feedback on the action plan.

If there’s a key theme that you aren’t able to action, it’s still important to communicate the reason to your team. When your employees can see their feedback is still being acknowledged, they’ll be more understanding if they know why it can’t be implemented just yet. 

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