Annual staff survey
Employee engagement should be a part of corporate culture. That means asking for employee input frequently and consistently. A traditional method of measuring employee satisfaction is through an annual staff survey. It appears that employee staff surveys are being replaced by a real time approach to measuring and driving employee commitment and passion. Annual staff surveys are increasingly being linked to strategic change, both organisational and cultural.
Medium hard to implement - May take some organizational change to implement.
Develop an internal Human Resources ‘Application’ or online portal for continuous feedback. This enables employees to raise concerns or provide feedback confidentially and on their own accord. Organisations need to recruit Human Resource staff that are suitably qualified and trained to ensure both organisational and employee needs are met.
Success factors
Annual staff surveys are said to have a beneficial effect, when the survey procedures are used to encourage sharing of views about the organisation, which results in a degree of cultural change. Surveys can also be useful to management, as the results may provide information underlining what has already been identified by managers. This assisted management in having the confidence to address any issues, and assess appropriately, the action that might be taken.
Challenges
Many employees feel that annual staff surveys are an outdated method of engagement. Annual engagement surveys only provide a gauge of engagement at a set point in time and miss opportunities to monitor the employee experience on a more regular basis.
Surveys are often tedious to fill out. As a result, employees are not motivated to participate. Organisations can make participation mandatory, but if employees don’t find that the exercise is engaging, they could see skewed results. Engagement should be frequent and consistent, not just once a year.
Although a survey may be detailed, they often lack depth. Organisations need to explore the factors that contribute to employee satisfaction and determine whythose factors matter.
If a survey is inappropriately applied, or the results misinterpreted or undisclosed, then the actual act of undertaking a survey may rebound on the organisation. The data extracted from the survey needs to be assessed and actions implemented. After employees fill out annual surveys, engagement often ends there. When companies don’t fulfill the feedback ‘loop and act’ on survey results, employees don’t see the benefit of their participation, discouraging them from participating in the future.
A socially accountable organization designs its services to meet the needs of the population it serves. This implies having systems in place to regularly assess the population needs or monitor changes on an on-going basis.
How can we be sure that our service model best meets the needs of our population, provides the most cost-effective solutions, and leverages advances in technology? The service model must best meet the needs of the population, and metrics are required to monitor the effectiveness of the service model. In addition to understanding the population’s
service needs, a strong body of evidence suggests that, especially in rural and remote environments, the most successful health-service models are explicitly tailored to the local environment.
Delivery of safe and effective healthcare in remote and rural areas requires a specific additional skill set including ongoing skills maintenance and continuing education. In addition to ensuring there are appropriately tailored education and training opportunities that are accessible to remote and rural practitioners, there is a need to ensure recruits are learning-focused and have the ability to develop the remote and rural skill set that is required. This Framework challenges this perception and encourages organizations to seriously consider the characteristics of the person you would like to hire. Management may find that the promotion and advertising materials used may be targeting the wrong person.
In rural remote communities, professionals often work in isolation, without access to specialist support that they may have enjoyed in previous urban roles or in their training. Rural and remote health leaders who report that they have overcome challenges in recruitment and retention of professionals typically report that they consider supporting team cohesion to be a major part of their role. They involve their team of professionals in decisions on who to recruit to the team, they create opportunities for their team to socialize and learn together, and offer them some control over their work environments (shift scheduling, strategic planning, creation of leadership roles among professionals, such as regional professional development lead).
Supporting your professional teams to access professional development that is relevant to their rural and remote work environment can be a significant factor in enhancing the quality of services in your community and in retention of employees. A mixture of well designed “at distance or “technology enhanced” education programmes together with some “face-to-face” education and training should be offered.
Developing an academic/training mandate for an organization, and potentially seeking funds to allow professional teams to dedicate time to training the professionals of the future will lead to a strong return on investment. There is a clear and substantial body of evidence which confirms that offering health professional training in rural and remote environments leads to increased retention of those professionals. Furthermore, training and rural and remote environments ensures that professionals have the unique skills that are needed for rural practice.
Hartley, J. and Benington, J. (2000), “Co‐research: a new methodology for new times”,European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, Vol. 9, pp. 463‐76.
Nadler, D.A. (1977), Feedback and Organization Development: Using Data‐based Methods, Addison‐Wesley, Reading, MA.
Hartley, J. (2001) "Employee surveys ‐ Strategic aid or hand‐grenade for organisational and cultural change?", International Journal of Public Sector Management, Vol. 14 (3), pp.184-204, https://doi-org.ezproxy.lib.monash.edu.au/10.1108/09513550110390846
Nickless, R. (2015, Dec 09). Faster feedback a winner over annual staff reviews.The Australian Financial ReviewRetrieved from https://search-proquestcom.ezproxy.lib.monash.edu.au/docview/1746594660?accountid=12528