How to Present the Results of Employee Surveys

If you want your company to be successful, you need happy, productive and engaged employees. But you won’t know how you are faring in these areas just by guessing – you need to take the time to gather data, set a base-line and then work to improve on your results in the future.

A great way to do this is to carry out regular employee engagement surveys which can assess the state of your employees’ minds by asking them questions about how they feel about certain aspects of your organization – including what they like and what they don’t like about their jobs and their workplace.

Your survey results can help you to improve your organizational culture and its overall performance, build trust with your employees and help you to identify any long-term trends emerging within your company.

Once your survey is completed, you should be prepared to share the findings with your employees – no matter how bad the results are. This will help you to build trust and in return make employees feel more comfortable with sharing in future surveys.

Additionally, if the results are bad, delaying or withholding the findings entirely can cause more animosity and mistrust and further add to any negative feelings disenchanted employees may be feeling.

Tips for releasing the survey results include:

Having the information come from your senior leadership team – ideally your CEO or an executive in charge of organizational performance or human resources.

Releasing your survey results as quickly as possible - some organizations make the mistake of holding off for many months, which creates mistrust.

Remind your employees why the survey happened – you need to reassure your staff what your intentions were in gathering this data.

Tell them what the data is showing you - if it is showing that there is room for improvement, say so. If staff are happy and engaged, celebrate this.

Tell them what you will be doing with this feedback – now that you have the information, what are you planning on doing with it? Do you have strategies to solve problems? Will you be taking steps to address them?

Show visuals if possible – people don’t always enjoy reading slabs of text and lots of statistics. If you can make charts or infographics to go along with the release of your data, it will be more engaging for employees to consume.

Deliver results in a way that you know staff will actually receive – consider using an innovative communications solution such as DeskAlerts to guarantee the delivery of your important internal communications by sending pop-up notifications and links straight to your employees’ desktops.

It’s crucial that your survey should be just as much about implementing the findings and changing your organization as it is about gathering the data in the first place.

Your leadership team should be prepared to take actions based on the findings of your survey, identifying areas where change is needed and aiming to implement strategies to make appropriate improvements.

You should also carry out regular surveys so you can compare data and determine if any of the strategies you’ve implemented have been effective or if more work is needed to come up with solutions to your issues.