Research shows that 1 in 4 employees say a better manager is the one thing to improve the workplace. It’s no wonder then that organizations are constantly seeking ways to enhance management effectiveness and gain valuable insights into this segment of the workforce. One powerful tool that has emerged is the use of management effectiveness surveys. These surveys, conducted through various digital platforms and applications, provide a streamlined and efficient way to gather feedback from employees, allowing HR departments to make informed decisions.
By leveraging technology, organizations can design surveys that target specific areas of management, such as leadership effectiveness, communication, and employee engagement. The use of technology not only simplifies the survey administration process but also enables real-time data collection and analysis, leading to quicker and more accurate insights. If 2023 really is The Year of Manager Effectiveness, we’ve got your roadmap.
The Role of Surveys in Management Effectiveness
Surveys offer several advantages for enhancing management effectiveness. First and foremost, they provide a confidential and anonymous platform for employees to express their opinions and share valuable feedback. This anonymity encourages honest responses, enabling organizations to uncover potential issues that may otherwise go unnoticed.
Additionally, the use of technology allows for automated data collection and analysis, reducing the administrative burden on HR teams. With real-time feedback and instant reporting, management can swiftly identify trends, pinpoint areas of improvement, and make data-backed decisions to enhance their leadership strategies. Overall, manager effectiveness surveys provide a valuable opportunity to optimize the effectiveness of management across organizations.
Understanding Digital Management Surveys & Their Benefits
The truth is, manager feedback can be tough to collect, and even harder to deliver in the right way—but it doesn’t have to be. Taking a 360-degree approach, maintaining anonymity and delivering results with respect all go a long way towards creating a positive experience. Then, after a manager gets acquainted with their results, highlighting the path forward is crucial.
Most importantly, remember that employee listening of any kind is an ongoing process. Gathering manager feedback should not be a one-and-done effort. Find a periodic cadence that makes sense for your organization and start benchmarking results and tracking progress over time. Train-up using the feedback received. Ultimately, by investing in your managers and their development, you help them lead their teams to success and create positive changes in your organization.
Implementing Digital Management Surveys: A Step-by-Step Roadmap
Managerial relationships can make or break engagement in the workplace, affecting performance, productivity, and culture. The most effective managers help people feel connected, supported, and inspired, but even the best need feedback, support and resources. Digital management surveys provide managers with the feedback from employees that they need to begin upskilling. More importantly, they simplify the entire feedback process, saving time and energy while providing actionable results.
Best Practices
To ensure the success of these surveys, follow a few best practices known to promote high participation rates and accurate data collection. For starters, be strategic about the questions you ask so that you are set up to take action and support your managers in their opportunity areas. Identify what categories you want to know about and ask questions on the same topic in different ways to validate the consistency of responses. Lasty, consider a 360-approach where feedback about each manager is collected from multiple sources such as direct-reports, leadership, and peers.
According to a Microsoft study, 76% of employees would stay longer at a company if they could benefit more from learning and development support. By effectively utilizing the post-feedback development and skill-building piece of the process, you immediately set your managers up for success while increasing engagement and happiness.
Challenges
Ensuring that the survey platform is user-friendly and accessible to all employees should be a top priority. Opt for a digital survey tool that is easy to navigate, mobile-responsive, and compatible with different devices—desktops, laptops, tablets and phones—and operating systems, i.e. Apple and Android. Test the survey thoroughly before launching to identify technical issues or glitches.
Non-technical challenges are often user-errors. Provide clear instructions on how to complete the survey and set a reasonable deadline for submission. To overcome low engagement and encourage participation, offer incentives or rewards to employees who complete the survey. Think: gift cards and/or recognition.
Measuring and Analyzing Survey Data for Actionable Insights
So you’ve strategically created and launched your user-friendly survey and the results are rolling in. Well done! Now, to maximize the manager survey process, you must use the incoming data to create meaningful, actionable insights. The most productive way to move forward is to go over the results individually with each manager. Discuss what areas were identified as strengths and create a plan of action for their opportunity areas. People Element’s Manager 360 tool generates custom action plans based on each manager’s results and sends them automated emails with useful training materials.
Seeing a pattern of opportunities in areas like communication or relationship building? Consider setting up a live training session that can be attended as a group and enhanced to create a full team-building event. The most important part of this process is to make sure managers feel supported and that they are being held accountable and recognized for their effort. Utilize feedback from management surveys for professional development, not for performance reviews.
Case Studies: Real-Life Examples of Enhanced Management Effectiveness
In 2021, Dallas Nephrology Associates (DNA) learned first-hand how to capitalize on the valuable role that their managers play in their workplace. Utilizing People Element’s platform for employee engagement surveys, they identified growth & development as an opportunity area. Because managers play a large role in supporting professional development efforts, they chose to foster their manager/employee relationships using a three-pronged approach.
For starters, they dug deeper, incorporating survey questions to help managers both determine employee goals and a path to reach them. They also bolstered a culture of growth, identifying development opportunities that would be of interest to their team, including education reimbursement, virtual training, and in-house programs. Finally, they renewed their focus on managers, directors, leads, and supervisors, providing them tools they need to build stronger relationships with their staff.
Ultimately, DNA adopted the guiding principle that the job of a leader is to develop new leaders, and they enabled their managers to do just that. After implementing their three-prong approach, the organization conducted another annual survey in 2022 to measure progress, resulting in an increased manager score of 86% favorability and a 3-point improvement around the question, “I have someone at work who encourages my professional development.”
How People Element Drives Technology
Using an employee survey solution like People Element can streamline the entire digital management survey process from start to finish. With full templates of validated survey questions, all you need to do is send the anonymous survey link to employees and the responses are automatically collected and your data presented in your personal, online dashboard. You’ll set your managers up for success, helping them to sharpen skills, improve relationships and develop the next generation of leaders.
Our Employee Listening experts are here for you, and if you are ready to discuss your listening strategy and tools you can request a quick call with us here.
