People - Employee Engagement & Retention (Assessing Employee Engagement) Flashcards
How should a chief HR officer explain to her senior leadership colleagues the value of measuring employee attitudes through an annual survey?
By demonstrating how the survey can reveal unreported problems
Asking for evaluations of a variety of issues and often allowing anonymity, surveys can identify issues employees are hesitant or don’t think to raise with supervisors or management.
Exit data reveals a higher-than-normal rate of voluntary turnover. To investigate further, HR plans to survey the employees. Which type of survey should HR conduct?
Employee engagement survey
Engagement surveys focus on employee satisfaction, commitment, and morale, thus providing greater insights into employees’ desire to stay with the company. Opinion surveys seek to gain opinions on certain processes, and attitude surveys attempt to determine employees’ perceptions of their working environment.
Which factor is critical for HR to consider before conducting an employee engagement survey?
Leadership buy-in and commitment to act on survey results
Leaders and managers must demonstrate a commitment to responding to survey results. Surveys that are administered and not followed up on can signal a lack of respect and commitment to the employees and can erode the trust employees have in their leaders
Which question would be most appropriate in an employee opinion survey?
Does your supervisor administer the overtime policy in a consistent manner?
Opinion survey questions are designed to elicit employee views related to specific issues, such as how work policies or practices are administered. Employee attitude surveys seek data on employee perceptions of the organization’s culture and image. Engagement surveys examine employees’ levels of job satisfaction, commitment, and morale.
An HR professional is compiling the questions for an upcoming institutional engagement survey. How best can she determine the most effective survey questions?
By linking the questions to business objectives
Employee engagement surveys focus on employees’ level of job satisfaction, commitment, and morale. Survey questions or statements should explicitly link to business objectives.
Which is a critical consideration to address before proceeding with an online survey?
Ensuring the confidentiality of participants’ responses
The most critical issue is the confidentiality of the opinions and information participants provide. Without confidentiality, participants may be reluctant to provide constructive feedback. Questions of system security, access, and survey design are important but secondary.
An organization has become dysfunctional: Morale is low, reports of discipline-worthy offenses and conflicts with supervisors are increasing, and productivity is down. Which initial step would HR take to gain more information about possible causes?
Third-party-administered survey
Since the problem may be with employee relationships with supervisors and/or management, ensuring the anonymity of employee feedback may be essential to gathering useful information. Using a third party to report anonymous results would be an effective first step in gathering data.
In a downsizing environment, which question would be most appropriate to include in an employee opinion survey?
Does your supervisor elicit your opinions about work processes?
Employee opinion surveys focus on the opinions of employees related to work processes, such as cross-training programs, safety programs, or recognition plans.
An organization conducts a confidential survey of employees to assess workplace satisfaction. Responses are received from 75% of employees, and, after analyzing comments, management requires mandatory retraining of all supervisors. What important step has the organization omitted?
Sharing feedback with stakeholders
Although it is laudable that the organization has acted on the survey results, the organization should have reported key results from the survey to employees. Given the high response rate, the survey must have been designed to facilitate response. Since the survey focus was general, there is no indication that management had predetermined the need for supervisory training.
A department manager is interested in knowing how his employees are doing with their work activities and how he can best support each employee on his team, particularly with issues within the manager’s control. Which approach does this best describe?
Stay interview
Stay interview is usually conducted by an employees manager.
Employers often conduct stay interviews as a retention tool to keep good employees from jumping ship. Unlike exit interviews, which amount to autopsies of why an employee is leaving, stay interviews are conducted during employment to help employers ascertain why good employees stay and what might make them leave. It’s important to listen and gather ideas from an employee about how a manager and the organization can retain him or her.
A manager asks the HR manager to help with retaining a high-potential employee. Which of the following recommendations would best address this request?
Conduct a stay interview with the employee to identify job satisfiers and dissatisfiers that can be addressed.
Stay interviews allow a manager to identify what drives engagement and retention with an employee. They are often conducted with high-potential employees. Stay interviews are different from exit interviews, which gather data following a departure. Stay interviews are considered a leading indicator of engagement and satisfaction, while exit interviews are considered a lagging indicator.
To maximize senior leadership support of action to be taken on the results of a recent climate survey, which is the most important message for the HR manager to deliver?
Advise leadership to acknowledge strengths and weaknesses in practices and identify priority areas to focus on.
Employers that acknowledge findings, whether good or bad and short-term or long-term, find that trust increases due to transparency.
HR at a professional services organization needs to assess employee interest in a possible new benefit quickly. Which is the best vehicle HR should use?
Online survey
The online survey can be conducted quickly and a response threshold set. The other methods are too time-consuming which are (third party adminstered paper based survery, focus groups, individual interviews)
