Boost Employee Engagement: Combine Surveys With Objective Data
Workforce sentiment is a metric that HR leaders constantly monitor. It factors into many key business decisions, from improving company culture to measuring staff productivity. The go-to method for measuring workforce sentiment is employee engagement surveys, but there is a trend of overreliance on these surveys without empirical, objective data to back them up.
For example, an employee survey may reveal that everyone is happy with the introduction of a new software training program. However, very few employees signed up for the program. Objective data can tell you why the disparity exists.
The Importance of Blending Objective and Subjective Data
Objective data is measurable and often accessible via unique sources within an organization, such as the HCM Suite, Talent Analytics solutions, CRM, and others. Subjective data reflects personal feelings or perceptions, like what’s revealed in an employee engagement survey. It requires human observation and interpretation.
Both types of data are important. There’s a common bias that objective data is more “true,” but this article from MIT points out that machine-gathered data has its own challenges. Often, objective data does not account for the human element. While that doesn’t make it less valuable, it highlights the need to combine objective and subjective data for a complete understanding.
The Problem with Employee Engagement Surveys
In an employer’s market, your staff will always do the thing that makes them look better. Even if an employee engagement survey is billed as anonymous, not many believe that to be true. Even if it can be proven that data collection is completely anonymous, there are ways to tell who wrote something through writing style, comments, and general tone. As a result, employees are most likely to respond with what they think the company wants to hear.
Andrea Derler, principal of research and value at HR analytics platform Visier, points out that overreliance on these surveys is a mistake for a few reasons:
- They capture qualitative (subjective) data
- They rely on historical data (lagging indicators)
- Presenting the data in aggregate means individual nuances are lacking
Many of these challenges can be overcome by combining employee engagement surveys with robust workforce analytics. In some cases, workforce analytics can offer near real-time insights, trending data and predictive analytics.
How Prodoscore Solves the Employee Engagement Problem
Prodosocore offers workforce analytics with AI-powered actionable insights. The solution highlights who is collaborating, how long employees spend on specific software solutions, and provides a general overview of daily work activities. Unlike other employee productivity monitoring software, it is non-invasive and transparent; your staff participates in the process by accessing their productivity data and recommendations for improvement and growth.
Prodoscore can also help fill data gaps from other solutions. In our earlier example of the software training program, you may see through Prodoscore that several employees are not using the new solution. If the employee engagement survey asked if they were happy with the new program, they may have said yes because they just didn’t want to get in trouble for not using it.
