What you put into something is what you'll get out of it.
That statement is true for most areas of the life—the more effort you exert, the better the returns. It holds true for employee engagement survey demographics. Demographics are critical to uncover what parts of your organization are thriving and which could use some work.
But if you don’t take the time and effort to create representative demographic groups, your survey data will be all over the place and won’t tell a complete story.
Here are five common mistakes we see organizations make and how to overcome them.
The results from these groups can yield some insights, but the broad parameters make it difficult to take meaningful action. You're not likely to treat people differently based on the data.
SOLUTION: Consider how your organization functions and break down employees into more targeted groups like division, department, job level, and location. This will more accurately pinpoint strengths and weaknesses.
For example, your organization might have employees with the roles of "Director of Insights," "Senior Analyst," and "Analyst." They're all doing fairly similar work but are separated in your demographic breakdown.
SOLUTION: Create new demographic groups that pull in similar employees with slightly different job titles. Instead of getting insufficient results at each level, you can examine your teams of analysts as a whole.
While it's useful to have results to compare, you're not actively looking for ways to uncover more meaningful data.
SOLUTION: Put some thought into more targeted groups that are a bit outside the norm. For example, let's say you recently conducted a pulse survey to capture employee perceptions about leadership accountability. Create a demographic for the surveyed employees and judge whether their engagement scores improved. Other possibilities include groups of employees who were recently promoted, were assigned as mentors, or have been in a certain role for years. Get creative.
Managers are a vital piece of the puzzle when creating an engagement culture. You're missing a critical opportunity if you don't capture their perceptions. For instance, if your managers don't understand your organization's plan for success, how are they going to be able to get their direct reports to understand, let alone buy into, those plans?
SOLUTION: Break your managers into groups. Employees tend to fall into one of three groups: contributors, managers, and managers of managers. You can break down your managers into deeper groups if you wish, but starting with those three classes will really help clean up your data.
It's assumed that breaking employees into cleaner, updated, and accurate demographic groups will be time-consuming and difficult.
SOLUTION: The investment is absolutely worth it and will pay dividends. And it's really not as hard to do as you might think: just send your Quantum Workplace representative an Excel file that includes a unique employee identifier (think "Email" or "Employee ID") and the new demographic data.
When you are first getting your demographic groups set up, work with your Customer Success Manager to see if what you're doing is in line with best practices. If you've already had your demographics loaded, we can help add and updated new ones. These simple tweaks will help you ramp up your analytic potential in no time.
The more effort you put into cleaning up your data, the more it's going to tell you. To learn more, check out our free webinar, 6 Tips to Harness Data and Keep Your Talent.
Published January 25, 2019 | Written By Spencer Goracke
