Part 2
When an organization runs an employee survey, there is an implicit understanding among employees and teams that change will happen – after all, that’s the reason for doing the survey in the first place. Importantly, this change must address both companywide issues as well as local concerns. In fact, WTW research has shown that following employee surveys, when there are both companywide actions combined with local actions, the improvement in employee experience is over four times greater than when there is company action alone.
But driving local change is notoriously hard, especially for managers with limited time and support. Many modern employee survey platforms were built primarily for customer experience studies, not employee experience studies that require manager action. While this is fine for central analytics teams, it results in a lack of local insights and guidance for managers to drive local change.
So what do managers need? In part 1 of this series, we discussed the need to provide managers with direct access to the results and the ability to simply interrogate the data. With this approach managers can quickly uncover the real insights needed to drive change. But how can we further support them to implement that change?
Working directly with HR colleagues is time-consuming and not always scalable. As an alternative, many companies provide access to “action planning” tools, but these are often overly complicated and geared more toward compliance than manager support. Providing lengthy training courses is another approach but also falls short of what’s needed. Instead, our work with clients shows that what works best for managers is bite-sized insights and digestible pieces of credible inspiration, provided at the time of need (e.g., while results are being reviewed) and tailored directly to the individual manager’s results.
With this in mind, we recently launched Engage Coach, a new feature of Engage Smart Reports.
Engage Coach provides managers and leaders with short pieces of advice, written by WTW subject matter experts with decades of experience helping managers act on survey findings. Written specifically with busy managers in mind, the advice is both focused and practical and combines immediate actions with longer-term suggestions. It appears on the manager’s survey dashboard and corresponds to each of the three priority areas selected for them based on their unique pattern of results. Managers can also search through the Engage Coach library of nearly 500 carefully crafted suggestions, categorized by suggestion type, topic, and population, for helpful advice for nearly any issue which arises from an employee survey. This material includes both WTW-published content as well as a library of thousands of videos, articles and book summaries from hundreds of popular and business media.
Managers can’t employ subject matter experts to help solve their business issues, but that doesn’t mean they should have to fend for themselves or be left to navigate complex action planning tools or sign up for lengthy training. Instead, by using Engage Coach, they can get focused, tailored advice when they need it.
Contact your WTW team today to enable Engage Coach for your managers and leaders and start supporting local change or request a demo of Engage.
Adam is the dynamic force behind Engage, WTW’s game-changing employee engagement platform. His goal is to create the world's greatest software for understanding and improving the whole employee experience, at work and in life, driving action, change and impact on organizations’ EX, company culture, and business performance. In his own life outside of work, Adam enjoys off-roading in his Jeep and spending time with his family. Follow Adam on Twitter and LinkedIn.
