Surveys and Relationships


There are just a few days left to take the Employee Engagement Survey. I appreciated the thoughts that HR Director Keith Jenkins shared about this at last week’s Leadership Meeting. Keith expressed that the best reason for employees to take the survey is because their leaders have built relationships with them, creating an atmosphere of communication and openness. Taking the survey becomes a response to that relationship.

In a Google search on employee engagement surveys, I ran across an article that echoes this same thought. This article is on the website of SHRM (Society for Human Resource Management), and quotes Rajeev Peshawaria, author of Open Source Leadership: Reinventing Management When There’s No More Business As Usual:

“’To earn trust [a leader] should have demonstrated all along that he [or she] cared about his [or her] employees, and should not have waited until the survey to find out that there was a morale problem,’ he said. ‘Surveys are a very poor substitute for daily face-to-face communication. The idea is to create enough trust such that people can speak up without having to hide behind surveys. Keep talking to your people all year long, stay in touch with their issues and keep inspiring them about the mission and purpose of the organization.’”

In the context of this kind of relationship between leaders and employees, the survey becomes just one more piece of the ongoing conversation about the workplace experience.

Called to Care Action

Please encourage all of your employees to take the survey, if they haven’t yet.

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