6 Steps to Follow-Up on Employee Engagement Survey Results

So, you’ve completed a pulse survey using PerformYard Engagement. The data is rolling in, and your dashboard is filled with all sorts of new insights.

Now what? 

Engagement data starts to become useful as you segment, filter, and add to it. That’s all possible with the PerformYard Engagement Dashboard. 

The article below will explain the six steps you should take after running one or more engagement surveys. These steps are designed to help you identify themes within your results and find ways to take action. 

Let’s dive in.

Step 1: Start by analyzing the general themes.

There are a few questions you can answer with an initial scan of the pulse survey data. 

• Which satisfaction factors have the highest scores?
• Which satisfaction factors have the lowest overall scores?
• Which satisfaction factor scores have improved or declined since the last survey? (only applicable once you’ve run multiple surveys)

Got your answers? Great! Keep those in mind, and let’s move on to communication and digging deeper.

Step 2: Thank your employees and share some positive high-level results 

You might ask the CEO to send an organization-wide communication that shares a few positives from the survey. For example, “We’re happy to see   scores in Trust and Leadership across the company.” The communication should also note that there will be additional follow-up to address some of the areas for improvement, without diving into specifics this early in the process. 

» How to Build an Effective Employee Engagement Feedback Model

Step 3: Dig into the employee cohorts

When you start to review the data, you should be segmenting results by cohort to find anomalies. You’re looking for instances in which one cohort excels in a satisfaction factor, and another cohort lags. 

The first step is to identify your cohorts. In PerformYard, cohorts are backward-looking. That means you can create a cohort even after the survey has been completed and segment the results however you want. 

With PerformYard cohorts, you can do near-infinite analysis to find anomalies within your organization. 

Here are some common ways to segment employees by cohort:: 

• Certifications
• Tenure With the Company
• Start Date 
• Manager
• Department

• New Hires 
• Remote Workers vs. In-Person
• Work Location
• …and many more. 

If you create cohorts based on a manager, you might find that you’ve uncovered a manager with issues on their team. The solution is to find a manager that’s doing well, in the same factors, and have them coach the other manager.

If you create cohorts based on department, you might find that the company as a whole is struggling with one issue, but one department is not struggling with that issue. The next step is to find out how the successful department is overcoming this issue.

Overview of Cohorting

The Cohorts Page lets you analyze employee satisfaction and engagement by groups of employees. You can compare the various cohorts' satisfaction factors vs. the overall company-wide employee ratings on the same factors. This will help you identify areas of potential improvement with specific groups of employees.

‍

Reading the Cohort Satisfaction Heatmap

The Cohort Satisfaction Heatmap chart lets you compare cohorts across the various factors of engagement and satisfaction. The first row of the table shows the overall scores across All Employees. This provides a benchmark. 

You can use the column headers to sort columns and discover which cohorts have higher or lower satisfaction scores for certain factors.

Step 4: Start your internal discussions

Company leaders at all levels should discuss results transparently amongst themselves, and then with their teams. The ideal way to do the team meeting is to share some relevant details about organizational and departmental-level results. If one team scored lower in a certain satisfaction level than the company as a whole, the manager of that team should be talking about it openly with their team. This allows for an open dialogue to begin.

‍Step 5: Identifying Projects to Fix Issues

Once you’ve identified a few areas where one cohort is excelling and another is falling behind, the goal is to develop projects to help fix those issues. 

You can do this by talking to the cohorts with high scores. Find out what they’re doing well. Learn tips that you can pass along to the cohorts that don’t have high scores. This might involve asking a high-score manager to coach a low-score manager. It could also involve copying processes from a high-score cohort and inserting them into a low-score cohort. 

This process could look different depending on how you segment your cohorts. For example, if you find that new hires are scoring lower on “fit” than established team members, you may want to rethink your onboarding process or even you’re hiring process. 

Step 6: Run the next survey

Running multiple surveys is the best way to get actionable insights from PerformYard engagement. You may find that you don’t want to take any action until you’ve run a few surveys. The more data you have, the more clear the trend lines will be. 

You can then compare the results to your last survey. Review areas of greatest improvement and decline since your last survey so you can understand what progress you’ve made (and can continue to reinforce) as well as what areas need more attention.

Once you’ve run multiple surveys, you can also check the Satisfaction Trendline in PerformYard.

The Satisfaction Trendline Chart shows historical satisfaction across all employees and up to four selected cohorts for a certain time period. If you hover over individual points on the chart you’ll see the actual satisfaction score at that point in time. 

Following these steps will help you get the most out of the PerformYard Engagement survey and dashboard. Now that you’re familiar with the post-survey process, you’re ready to enact change within your organization.