When conducting staff surveys there are a number of stakeholder groups to be considered. Effective handling of each of these groups will secure a more successful outcome for your organisation. Find out more about the first stakeholder group, line managers.

Staff Surveys and Line Managers

Each stakeholder group has different roles and responsibilities during the process of staff surveys. The effective use of each of these groups will improve the short term and long term benefits of your employee survey.

Understanding levels of staff satisfaction and employee commitment helps to improve productivity and staff turnover. The effective use of a staff survey can, therefore, save your company vital resources.

Line managers are absolutely pivotal throughout the engagement survey process. They will be involved from data collection to the implementation of action plans.

Without the support of line managers, it will be very difficult to secure the participation and on-going support for the staff survey and its objectives. Therefore, this stakeholder group need to understand the objectives and rationale for the employee survey.

Line managers need to know how they will be involved and what the benefits will be to them and the organisation. They will have a real influence on how open staff are in their responses and how open they react to survey follow-up.

Find out more about Improving Employee Engagement Survey Response Rates.

Communication is Key

To secure high completion rates, employees must understand and buy-in to your organisation’s commitment to positive change. To achieve this, we explore how to maximise the effectiveness of communications to this stakeholder group at each stage of the staff survey process. These stages are specification and planning, data collection phase and analysis and feedback.

Here’s a guideline for the communications process with line managers:

Specification and Planning

  • They need to communicate with teams about employee survey objectives, rationale and timings;
  • Reinforce that staff surveys are anonymous – Third party provider for data collection;
  • How they will be involved in follow up action planning.

Data Collection Phase

  • Update managers of response rates and urge them to reinforce importance of participation with their teams;
  • Reinforce anonymity;
  • How to access the staff survey and time left to complete it.

Analysis and Feedback

  • Get managers to thank teams for their participation;
  • Provide results summary, companywide vs. business divisions;
  • Outline next steps and how managers will be involved in the follow-up of the engagement survey results.

Contact great{with}talent and find out more about their TalentEngage employee engagement surveys.

(Main image from The DPOE Effect)