New Breed of Supervisors: Essential Ingredient (1) Accountability for Engagement Survey Results

This is the second part in a series on the crucial role that supervisors play in driving employee engagement and customer satisfaction.

4 ESSENTIAL INGREDIENTS
For Supervisor Success

1. Accountability for employee engagement scores.
2. Time to spend with their reps.
3. Specialized engagement training.
4. Creative communication tools.

“Conventional supervisors rate the person and develop the performance. The New Breed of Supervisors do just the opposite — they rate the performance and develop the person.” – Barbara Burke

If you are serious about improving employee engagement you need to measure it. Having done thousands of these surveys, I’ve learned what works and what doesn’t. The following list captures some of the most important lessons learned.

Barbara’s 10 LESSONS LEARNED About Employee Engagement Surveys

1. Create your own survey to fit your needs.
Consider designing a survey to fit your situation. (I limit the number of questions to 12) Implement the survey using one of the easy-to-use and inexpensive on-line tools (I like Survey Monkey).

2. Involve the supervisors in crafting the survey questions.

3. Focus most of the survey questions on getting the employees’ opinion of the relationship and quality of support they receive from their supervisor. For example: “When talking with my supervisor about a problem or concern, I feel that he or she listens to me.”

4. Do everything you can to get all your employees to take the survey.

5. Use the initial survey to obtain a “before” snapshot of the current situation.
(Please do not do a survey unless you are serious about acting on the results.)

6. Use the results to pinpoint the supervisors’ training gaps are.
(Look for specific recommendations on supervisor training later in this series.)

7. Align what was learned in the survey with each supervisor’s professional development plan.

8. Gauge the effectiveness of the training on coaching and mentoring by repeating the identical survey for the next 3 to 4 quarters.

9. Incorporate the survey scores into the supervisors’ performance scorecard.
Remember the adage — “What gets measured gets done.”

10. Don’t lose sight of the purpose of the the engagement survey. While survey results are an important and useful data point, the real reason you are measuring engagement is to improve the satisfaction of your customers.

I hope that you find this information useful as you develop an engagement measurement process that works for you. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me. I’m happy to help.

Have a great week.

NEXT MONDAY: The 2nd Essential Ingredient for Supervisor Success — Supervisors need time to spend with their reps.