National Retailer Identifies Key Driver For Employee Engagement Through Strategic Surveys

Challenge

Knowing there is a problem with your employees is important, but when you don’t know why, you will continue to lose employees again and again, and powerless to retain your best employees. Actionable insights are key! A national retailer knew they had issues with employee engagement, but struggled to understand exactly what was behind employees feeling disengaged. Employee morale was low and their retention rate, in an already high churn vertical, was indexing significantly higher than previous years. They had reached an inflection point and needed to do something to reverse this business impacting trend.

Solution

With the help of People Element’s employee engagement surveys, this retail client gleaned valuable insights into an issue with communication between retail locations and corporate, and poor communication practices within each retail location. Top to bottom and across the organization, communications was a major driver of employee dissatisfaction and and a strong indicator of an employees desire to leave the company. Leadership started with a baseline survey to measure the current state of mind for every employee within the company. The goal was to identify any core areas of weakness they needed to address in order to improve employee engagement, increase employee satisfaction, and fix key areas of the company’s culture. By addressing these areas, they hoped to be able to improve employee performance.

Once key gap areas were identified as a result of the initial survey, the company created and implemented a detailed action plan. After 6 months, the company followed up with a second survey, to measure their progress against that plan.

Tactics Deployed:

Partner with People Element to provide Employee Engagement Survey capabilities
Roll out an initial survey to set a baseline measurement
Develop a detailed Action Plan based upon findings
Set up dedicated phone lines to capture employee feedback and suggestions
Increase retail manager involvement in implementing store to store communication best practices
Schedule regular check-point meetings to communicate key information between corporate and the retail locations and measure progress in real time
Leverage People Element’s communication templates and best practices to be used across the organization
Conduct a follow up survey 6 months later to measure progress
Report on results and iterate

Result

By leveraging People Element’s platform and implementing best practices, the client increased overall employee engagement/satisfaction scores by 17% with significant improvement in specific communication related issues. Their leadership communication results increased from 19% below the normative industry benchmark to less than 4% below the benchmark, a 15 percentage point improvement.

Overall employee engagement & satisfaction scores increased by 17%.
Employees rated previous communication related issues as most improved
Leadership communications rating improved by 15 percentage points
Anecdotally, cross store communications improved resulting in greater synergies and collaboration