Measuring employee engagement, acting upon survey findings, and remeasuring engagement employeesurveys_03-1actually improves it.  This should come as no surprise, but potential clients often want to know what kind of improvement in results they can expect — a very reasonable question.

The key scale we use for most of our survey questions is a five-point one, ranging from “disagree strongly” to “agree strongly.”   We break our surveys into sections, with each section containing several individual questions.  In the chart below we present the average “agree strongly” percentage for each of the major standard sections of our questionnaire for clients of various relationship lengths.

 

The first data point in the x axis is for clients we call “one and done.”  These are clients who came to us for one measurement and did not return.  Their scores are lower for all eleven sections than we found for the first measurements of clients who returned for subsequent survey measurements.  This makes sense; those who returned for subsequent measurements were more serious about improving employee engagement.  It’s conceivable that this seriousness already had manifested itself in higher scores than companies who are less serious about employee engagement.  The third data point on the x axis is for all new clients — those who returned for future surveys and those who did not.  The scores are, of course, in between the scores of the first two data points.

Reviewing the remaining data points, you can see how moving from the first survey conducted to the second and subsequent measurements results in a meaningful improvement in results for all eleven categories.  The improvement from the first data period to the fourth-and-subsequent  periods is on the order of 10 to 15 percentage points for all categories.

The above graph includes clients who worked very hard to improve employee engagement and those who did not.  As such, results for some individual organizations are even more spectacular.