How to share employee engagement survey results
Once an employee engagement survey is closed, the next step is sharing the results with your team. At this time, it's always important to celebrate the wins – for example, a high participation rate or a positive change in score for a focus area. Don't forget to also share feedback that might be uncomfortable to talk about as it is often the most valuable part of the process.
Employees know how they feel, and they’ve given their feedback through the survey. Sharing results back to the organization illustrates that you’re committed to open communication and open to celebrating strengths and addressing areas that need attention. However, there can be obstacles to sharing survey results.
Deciding who to share with and at what level of reporting is the first step to overcoming these obstacles. Then, you can bring everything together by communicating the results and familiarizing employees and managers with the reporting.
Choosing sharing groups and levels of reporting
Many organizations tend to share results based on roles, including HR managers, executives, and managers. You might choose to use these role-based guidelines as you roll out results:
- Human resources typically manage and administer engagement surveys. They also perform the initial review of all results and reports, including comments.
- Managers of groups meeting a minimum reporting size are expected to work with their teams to deduce learnings and take action based on the insights.
- Executives review results from their teams and often the entire organization.
- Individual employees should be able to view the results of engagement surveys. A platform that allows you to provide appropriate levels of access (like Culture Amp) will assist with this. General results and next steps can be discussed at an all-hands meeting.
Communicating results through sharing
After you’ve selected sharing groups and reporting levels, it’s time to share your results. Email communications typically work best because you can easily include a link to the recipients’ results view within the platform. A great way to start the sharing process is to lead with overall themes from the engagement survey results. This gives everyone a focal point while they explore the results and shows that later conversations will revolve around key areas of focus. Include anything that you want each group to take note of in their reports.
Here’s a sample email to managers:
Hi [name],
The results from our recent survey are now available for you to review. Overall there are some interesting themes: [List any themes here that you’d like to call out. This should include factors that you particularly want your managers to take action on. You have been given access to view results for your team.]
The next step is for you to share and discuss the insights with your team and choose an area to focus on for this quarter. Here’s an article with some tips for taking in the results.
If you have any questions, please contact [name].
Learning faster through feedback
Sharing feedback only gets easier with practice - and once people see the benefits of giving feedback, discussing results, and taking action on areas that will impact engagement, they’ll be keen to participate in the process more and more.
