Perhaps the most common pitfall that companies fall into when running employee surveys is in poor reporting of the results and a lack of action afterwards. Failure here will almost always fatally undermine the whole process. So, we thought we’d offer some guidance on this crucial aspect of surveys based on best practice and our experience in the field.Whatever the makeup of your organisation, you’ll need to report employee engagement survey results to different stakeholder groups in different ways and potentially using different channels and delivery formats. We shed some light on what this might look like, share some sample templates and the aspects of results you may include in each.
Reporting to your employees
You’ll likely want to give employees a results overview, perhaps including key findings, successes and improvement areas, and planned next steps. Naturally, the right format here will depend on where your employees are based and what will be most easily accessible to them. If, for example, lots of employees don’t have easy access to a PC, you could consider results roadshow events with a presentation by leaders supplemented by posters in staff areas. Where your employees are all online, you could utilise the company intranet or email to reach them – possibly with a short and snappy employee report. Alternatively video is a great medium to use to convey high level survey results in an impactful way.
Template examples:
Here’s an example of a high level employee report:
Reporting to your people managers
At the manager level, this group will be most interested in the results within their immediate team or business area. We suggest providing them with PDF format manager reports that are ‘action-oriented’, clearly setting out their team’s scores. These might include information such as highest and lowest-scoring questions, a benchmark comparison with the rest of the business or external organisations, and key areas to focus on for follow up (likely to be areas proven to significantly influence employee engagement, and where scores are lower).The level of detail you choose to provide to managers should depend on their comfort with, and appetite for, data. For example, you may keep the initial reports quite light but then separately provide them with access to a more detailed breakdown of results.
Employee survey report template examples:
The following screen shots show several of the pages from our typical manager ‘insight’ reports.
Reporting to your executives and business leaders
For your senior leader population, they will want an overall view of survey scores across the business, and likely some more detailed analysis of results and the factors underpinning them. The report format we invariably recommend here involves creating a PowerPoint report for Executives, taking them through the results, highlighting major themes, presenting the outcomes of a key driver analysis to show those questions (and areas) most influencing engagement, and exploring where to focus action planning at a business level.Another aspect that can be tremendously insightful for senior leaders is open comments analysis of results. This would include categorised responses, showing commonly occurring themes and giving real-life examples of comments that fall within each and explore how they relate to quantitative survey data.
Template examples:
This example shows some of the information we’d often include as part of reports prepared for senior leaders.
