Our survey says - Viewpoint - careers advice blog Viewpoint careers advice blog

Our survey says… - Viewpoint - careers advice blog Over 20 years ago, a new employee survey model should have heralded a revolution in HR data. It didn’t, so what’s the delay? HR communities regularly discuss the difficulty of getting hard data to support their initiatives. But in the early 1990s, executives at the American department store, Sears, identified a clear link between the engagement and behaviour of their staff and the performance of individual stores. Today, while some other retailers have since distilled strategic insights from their HR data (with Marks and Spencer a recent example), such stories of success are far from common in every sector. So, the question is: what can businesses still learn from Sears, and what is holding some organisations back? When Sears looked deep into its data, it realised it could develop a model for predicting changes, from a particular store’s sales to the effect on company-wide relationships with customers, employees and investors. Although the company had collected a wealth of data within HR, what was unusual about Sears was the success it had in connecting those various employee surveys to precise insights about its customers. Many retailers have gone on to develop their own predictive models, but this has not become ubiquitous. By adapting your approach to employee surveys, you can and should be tapping into the vast wealth of behavioural insight at every level of your organisation. Today, the companies that use employee surveys effectively do so by concentrating on far more than just employee satisfaction â€" the typical limit of many employee studies. They combine data from staff satisfaction surveys with other information, such as new hire and exit surveys, financial results, customer experience questionnaires and employee performance and behavioural data. The global restaurant chain McDonald’s has done just that, and found that teams with a particular balance outperformed restaurants with less diverse staff. As for those companies that have struggled to gain real value from their employee surveys, one barrier could be the way managers are taught to deal with survey results from their staff. Research from the business school INSEAD suggests that if data from the frontline is to influence strategy at a high level, middle management will need to change their attitude. View the full article from issue 6 of our bi-annual publication the Hays Journal, providing global insights into the world of work. You can view the article in the Hays Journal online, via the Hays Journal iPad app or request a printed copy from haysjournal@hays.com //