Hi. I'm
Mark Murphy, founder of Leadership IQ,
and I want to very quickly tell you
five reasons why our employee engagement survey is better.
Reason number one our employee engagement survey is better is
that we never ask a question we cannot fix.
Simply put, every question on an employee engagement survey
has to have a path to action, that
is, you have to be able to identify exactly what actions
you would undertake to correct this issue if it turns out
you've got a low score and this was a big predictor.
However, when you look at the vast majority of questions
on the typical employee engagement survey,
overall I'm satisfied with my job, I trust my boss,
my boss cares about me as a person,
these are questions that have absolutely no path to action.
If you ask a question like I trust my boss or my boss
cares about me as a person and you
get a low score on this question,
you're not going to be able to fix it.
Why?
Because there are literally three dozen things
you could do to fix whether or not the boss cares
about you as a person.
Should they set more challenging goals for you?
Should they set less challenging goals
and ease back a little bit on the pressure?
Should they spend more time with you?
Should they spend less time with you
and give you more autonomy and freedom?
The point is, we don't actually know which path is correct,
which means that we end up with a broken promise.
Whenever you ask a question of an employee on a survey,
it implies a promise you're going to do something
with the answer.
If you do not do something with the answer,
you break that promise and you annoy your employees.
So for example, rather than asking the question
like I trust my boss, we're going
to ask a question like when I share my work
problems with my direct leader, they respond constructively.
Why?
Because we can fix a leader responding constructively
when an employee shares their problem.
We can fix that in about 40, 45 minutes.
It is that simple and straightforward to correct.
So when you're asking a question,
you absolutely have to make sure that every single question
on your survey has a crystal clear path of action.
And that's why our survey questions
tend to be quite a bit different than the average question.
It's also why our clients tend to see increases
in their employee engagement.
We'll ask questions like constructive feedback
from a direct leader has helped me to improve my performance. I can
fix that in 30 minutes.
I know whether my performance is where it should be.
I can fix that in about 15 minutes.
Senior leadership has clearly explained their vision
for the future.
I can fix that in about maybe an hour.
When performance appraisals are open, honest, meaningful,
I can bring concerns about quality service or safety
to my direct leader and not worry about causing problems for myself.
We can fix all of these issues very, very quickly.
Reason number two why our employee engagement survey
is better is that we use an advanced statistical technique
called stepwise multiple regression that
is going to help you prioritize exactly which questions
on the survey are going to give your unique culture the fastest
increase in employee engagement.
If there are dozens of questions on your survey,
not all of those questions are going
to matter as much for your unique group of employees.
A startup in Silicon Valley is going
to be quite a bit different than a community hospital in Tupelo,
Mississippi, which is going to be quite a bit
different than a bank on Wall Street.
So we use stepwise multiple regression
to mathematically prioritize all the questions on your survey
and tell you these are the two or three questions that
are going to give you the biggest bang for the buck
when it comes to prioritizing employee engagement.
So if you want to actually see increases in employee
engagement, trying to tackle 10 or 15 or 20 different issues
is a recipe for failure.
By contrast in our survey, because we
use this advanced statistical technique,
we're able to say these are the two or three questions that
are going to have the fastest, by far,
increases in overall employee engagement.
And this is one reason why CEOs absolutely
love stepwise multiple regression,
because it helps them mathematically
prioritize exactly which areas they need to be working on.
Reason number three why our employee engagement survey is
better is that we are the only survey that
actually includes questions about employee's
emotional wellness.
You've heard all the stories about high levels of burnout
and how optimism is decreasing and resilience is down,
and all of that is true.
However, you don't know where in your organization
these problems are occurring.
So because we have a well-developed emotional
wellness scale, we build this into our survey
and we can actually pinpoint for you
where in your organization resilience is low,
optimism is low, internal locus of control is low,
where forgiveness is low, where perseverance is low, on and on.
And this way, we can not only identify for you
where in your organization you need
to work on more optimism or resilience, just as examples,
where burnout may be high, but we also
have an emotional wellness training library.
So when you discover that there is
an area with lower levels of emotional wellness,
we actually have the training courses that add onto this
so you can immediately start helping your employees increase
their optimism, their resilience,
reduce their burnout, et cetera.
Along those same lines, reason number four that our employee
engagement survey is better is that we actually
include leadership training with our employee engagement survey.
Here's the reality.
If you discover, for example, that one
of the reasons your employee engagement isn't as high as it
could be is that there isn't enough accountability
or that leaders are not giving robust enough feedback
or they're not setting stringent enough goals or stretch goals,
they're not challenging people, they're not mentoring people,
it turns out that if leaders knew how to do that,
they probably would have been doing it already.
So because Leadership IQ--
apropos the name-- is such a well-regarded leadership
training company, we're actually able to build
in leadership training that attaches to every single issue
we're assessing on the survey.
So when it turns out that your leaders need more skills
in mentoring and coaching their employees, guess what?
We actually have leadership training,
whether it's live, in-person, or online, to actually help
leaders develop those skills so that not only can you
identify what the challenges are,
but you can also quickly fix it, because we
can teach your leaders the skills to do this quickly.
And reason number five that our employee engagement survey is
better that we can assess your strategy and your culture
and actually test them via our employee engagement surveys.
So for example, let's say that your CEO wants to know,
well, is our strategy actually resonating with our employees?
Do people actually understand the rationale
behind all of our strategic decisions?
Do people actually buy into our strategy?
Well, we actually build those questions
into our engagement surveys so that while you're
surveying every employee in your company,
you may as well use this to really support the CEO
and test out your company's strategy.
And are there departments, for example,
where people really don't understand the rationale
behind our decisions?
Well, rather than continuing to send out bland corporate memos
over and over again, why don't we
prioritize all of our communication efforts
on the departments that do not understand
our strategy, our vision, that don't understand the rationale
behind our thinking?
Let's say we have a strategy for bold innovation, for example.
Well, in what departments do people
think that bold, innovative thinking is actually not
terribly well-rewarded, where bold, innovative thinking is
actually not listened to?
How can you have an innovative organization
when there are 50% of the departments in the organization
that don't actually prioritize bold, innovative thinking?
Is that actually going to work for you?
Of course it's not going to work.
So we build questions like this into our surveys
so that you can actually use this not just for employee
engagement, but you can use this as a tool
to test your strategy.
And along the same lines, we build
in an organizational culture assessment
into our engagement survey so that if you're
trying to create a shift in your corporate culture,
we can identify that as well.
We know in which departments in your organization, in which
divisions, in which areas do people
want more of a social culture or more
of an enterprising culture, where do they
want more process and structure?
We can pinpoint that for you so that you can figure out
exactly what steps we should take to improve our culture.
Listen, if any of this sounds interesting to you,
I strongly encourage you to reach out to us,
schedule a quick call.
We'll hop on a call for 30 minutes
and chat about what you want to accomplish with your employee
engagement survey.
If you want more actionable questions,
more prioritization, more emphasis
on actually not just surveying, but actually increasing
employee engagement, testing your strategy,
building in leadership training, increasing
the emotional wellness of your people, reach out to us.
We look forward to chatting with you.