I love this quote from Peter Drucker, one of the few people I’d give the term “guru” to around what he has taught around leadership.
“You are what you measure”
This is also a phrase I love, and I’ve written in various ways around this, including “Time for new metrics for leadership“, which focussed on leadership at corporate vision level as well as values of an individual and how they show up.
Today, though, I focus on the value of Employee Engagement Surveys.
A key area I work in is supporting leaders and their teams around transformative change. I break this into three elements in what I call “Cascading Leadership“, being Engagement, Alignment, Enrolment.
Now, on many occasions over the years I have been engaged by a client at a time when they have been catalysed to ask for support on receipt of their latest annual employee engagement survey results.
I love employee engagement surveys, they are always full of rich material to work with to see where the opportunities and gaps are.
You know what I love more? Working with a client over multiple years and seeing the improvement year by year as they transform!
How do they know they are transforming? Well, they measure it! After all, employee engagement surveys are only valuable if they are paid attention to for the value they hold, that they are a way to measure your impact on your people.
There are many different forms of employee engagement survey that can add value to your organisation. One caveat, though, is that people will only engage with the engagement survey (sorry about that language joke!) if they feel leadership will take the responses seriously and will act on them to make improvements. This is critical, and the more issues are listened to and acted upon, the better and better the results get over time.
So, please, please, please a) get an annual employee engagement survey done, and b) make sure you review it carefully and then act upon it.
I am not the HR specialist to help you select and run such a survey. I am, however, someone that leaders call to support them in reviewing and responding to the results.
You are what you measure.
When you see who you are by seeing what the measurements show you, call me, I’d love to talk through your next leadership steps!