Anatomy of an Employee Lifecycle Survey Program

The best companies in the world establish an employee listening strategy that allows them to gather feedback from every meaningful moment across the employee experience, compare and analyze swiftly, and then act on their findings with confidence. But it’s not easy to build an employee lifecycle survey program. You need to be able to measure experiences from their first days as a new hire, to capturing deep dive semiannual engagement feedback, to ongoing pulse, all the way to retire, so you can understand the differences between what leads to long-term retention versus regrettable attrition. 

With Lattice, you can easily implement an employee listening program that helps you measure, analyze, and act across the entire employee lifecycle. There are three components to building a comprehensive strategy around employee feedback. 

1. Listen continuously
2. Analyze proactively
3. Act confidently

Listen Continuously

Employee listening is about more than a once-or-twice-per-year engagement survey. People leaders need to be able to capture feedback at each moment in the employee experience to understand the factors that influence real employee outcomes like engagement, performance, development, and retention. 

• Onboarding surveys – understand the pieces of the new hire experience that make a long-term difference for your organization
• Deep dive engagement surveys – take the time every quarter or half to capture your people’s thoughts on their holistic experience and determine where to focus efforts
• Real-time pulse surveys – home in on key areas that you want to improve or monitor, and determine whether your actions are having an impact by measuring frequently and consistently
• Exit surveys – learn from those who are departing your company to find out what it was that drove them to a new opportunity and how things might have been improved for them.

Analyze Proactively

Answering the question “what does good look like?” is not as simple as it sounds when it comes to employee engagement. Every organization and every culture is different. It’s important to analyze results in the context of your own culture in addition to comparing against other organizations. Most importantly, this should be done on a proactive basis to identify trends so you can double-down on strengths and sniff out issues before they become problem areas.

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• Analyze each dimension of your culture – discover disparities between departments, geographies, performance levels and more to pick out the most important areas to focus within your company
• Compare against your organization’s past – look at results from historical surveys of your own company to see what’s trending positively or negatively to pinpoint how you have or can improve.
• Against specific groups – compare your responses to Lattice’s benchmarks in certain geographies, company sizes, and industries to see where you stack up against your peers
• And globally –  learn where everyone is excelling or experiencing the same challenges as you with a global benchmark encompassing all Lattice customers.

Act Confidently 

It’s said that you should only ask for feedback as frequently as you’re able to act on it. We believe that, too. Some use this guidance to recommend surveying less frequently to avoid fatiguing employees. Instead, we ask why we can’t accelerate and shorten the path to confident action. It’s not enough for today’s employees to take six months or a year between engagement surveys to see change take place at their organization. Lattice Engagement gives organizations the power to quickly establish a baseline, identify the right places to take action, and in real-time, assess whether those actions are producing their desired results so they can invest further or course correct. 

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• Determine where you can drive the greatest impact – driver analysis and connected analytics for performance and engagement give people leaders the tools to easily and quickly identify where they can focus their efforts for the largest results within their company.
• Action Plan – using action plans to share with the whole company where you’ll focus efforts to drive accountability and make employees feel heard
• Assess – use pulse surveys to determine whether your action plan is making an impact on the questions you care most about in real-time

With surveys across the employee lifecycle, people teams can not only measure the employee experience at every phase, but identify the parts of work life that lead to attrition. This is crucial, not only because the Great Resignation presents short term challenges for companies to retain their employees, but long-term adjustments in what employees expect from work. Acting on employee lifecycle survey feedback could be the difference between regrettable attrition and long-term employee retention and engagement.

To learn more about Lattice Engagement and see why over 4,000 companies trust Lattice to drive People Success, check out lattice.com/engagement, or schedule a demo with a product expert.