Last year, the well-being and health of employees and their individual work design gained even more importance in organizations. Particularly, remote collaboration and the dynamic environment to which many companies had to respond brought the link between employee well-being and the sustainable future of the company even closer.
Surveying employee satisfaction and their current mood represent an essential component for managing the company’s development.
At MDI, we have been successfully using the agile tool “TeamEcho” as a mood barometer since 2017. While we didn’t have an elaborate survey tool before, we knew that we were moving in dynamic times that required an intelligent survey system to respond quickly to needs.
A best practice report by Elisabeth Oppenauer
about what it’s like when the right questions are consistently asked at the right time.
Elisabeth Oppenauer is MDI Partner, Trainer, Coach, Organizational Developer & HR Manager
Asking the right questions at the right time
Have you ever experienced this? You are sitting comfortably with a colleague and suddenly he or she asks you a question that is meant to be completely trivial, but hits the spot for you and triggers something? While you do not even know why?
Coincidence or algorithm? In most cases, definitely a coincidence. In the case of an agile survey tool, it is usually a clever algorithm. It helps you to grasp in real time what is currently moving the team, the department or even the entire organization.
What services does an agile survey tool provide?
The most important functions include
- Automated surveys
- Trend analyses
- Discussion rounds
- Feedback management
- Team insights
The platform features survey algorithms that capture employee responses and create a satisfaction index that managers, L&D or HR can use to identify trends in employee engagement. Survey results are summarized in an information field and displayed in various categories. Such as
- work
- well-being
- health
- work tasks
- working conditions
- organizational climate
- identification with the company
In addition, leaders can capture key events in the index history of the company or individual team and measure satisfaction scores over different time periods.
Our experience so far
What I personally liked most (from my perspective as a leader and HR manager) was the request to submit a suggestion for improvement in the case of poor feedback. Also the request to provide a reason for the rating (anonymously, of course). Many took advantage of this opportunity and thus contributed to a solution-oriented feedback culture. As a result cooperation significantly improved as well as the dialog between employees, leaders and the organization.
In the end, this led to higher employee loyalty, a stronger commitment as well as the desire to be an active part of the corporate culture.
Experiences that I like to share with my clients when introducing an agile and transparent survey tool to measure employee satisfaction are as follows:
- summarize the results at least in quarterly cycles and
- to set possible improvement measures
- to take up comments in the discussion forum immediately and to use them
- maintain them like an internal employer evaluation platform
- to ask the employees from the beginning for solution orientation (what is the challenge and what could be a corresponding suggestion for improvement)
Also during the implementation of OKR, TeamEcho quickly provided a very valuable tool for analyzing employee satisfaction. As a result, it enabled us to respond to needs quickly and dynamically. Jointly we took our corporate culture to the next level, in the team, in the department and even at organizational level.
By the way: We have been awarded the TeamEcho seal of excellence!
Since 2017, we have been continuously and anonymously surveying employee satisfaction and the working atmosphere. In this way, we can sustainably improve the corporate climate.
AGILE EMPLOYEE SATISFACTION BAROMETER INSTEAD OF TRADITIONAL EMPLOYEE SURVEYMENT – This makes MDI Management Development GmbH an attractive employer that cares about the satisfaction of its employees!