Engaging with your staff

Keeping your staff engaged with surveys

If your engagement rate is low, your data will be less meaningful. When you ask your staff to answer a survey, you are not just asking them to dedicate some time to it. You are also asking them to share personal information. They need to trust that you will act on your findings. If they don’t believe their feedback will make a difference, they will disengage.

This is where your statement of intention matters for your first survey. For follow up surveys, these are still important. But what will make a huge difference is staff seeing progress. Before sharing again, they will want to see the impact of the first survey.

Keeping your staff engaged between surveys

You should keep your staff informed as you implement your action plans. This will give you opportunities to showcase what you are doing. Staff can feel included and see the difference the survey is making.

One common mistake is to merge feedback, evaluation and monitoring. Repeating your staff satisfaction survey will help you see your progress. And it can help you evaluate your staff’s satisfaction, for example.

But as you make changes, you should also get feedback. This should not be added to the monitoring survey. This will keep your objectives clear.

There are different ways to get feedback from your staff:

• If you have a staff network, you can reach out to them.
• You can set up a task and finish group with representatives.
• You can test a change on a small group of people.

This is incredibly helpful to test specific changes. For example, one of your goals might be to update your policy on reasonable adjustments. You should include staff at different steps of the way, such as:

• commenting on the content
• trialing new processes

You should not expect staff to participate in these initiatives on top of their regular workload. To make sure that you have a variety of staff included at different levels, you need to make time for them. Of course, this can be difficult. But it is worth it. You should make sure these groups represent staff with different lived experience and identities.