Sustainability and the Survey
Introducing a Sustainability Programme needs commitment, not just from the management. To be truly meaningful, everyone in the organisation should be on board and involved. But do you know what your employees are thinking? An employee engagement survey is one way to measure attitude towards environmental sustainability, as well as, other satisfaction issues.
Other indicators of general dis-satisfaction can include staff turnover rates and sickness days taken. But for this post, I’m going to concentrate on the employee engagement survey in relation to understanding attitude to environmental impact.
Survey Basics
There are many different tools for developing your own surveys with a minimal budget or you can opt for a professional service where you will be able to avoid many of the pitfalls of a DIY questionnaire. Ask me about Coral Mountain’s employee engagement surveys, which are cost effective and tailored to your individual requirements.
There are certain basics to consider when setting up your survey. First and foremost, think about your objectives. A survey in a vacuum is fairly pointless but if it forms the starting point for a specific project, then that will help defining the objectives.
In general, people like to be asked their opinion, especially if they understand that it forms part of a positive fact finding mission. However, some people will be wary of sharing their thoughts, especially if the organisation is not traditionally open in its culture.
What about the Questions?
Getting the right balance with the number of questions is important. Too few questions and you won’t get enough information to make informed decisions. Equally, too many questions will result in people becoming bored. That means they may not finishing the survey or worse, choose random inaccurate answers for speed.
On this basis, the recommendation is to integrate the investigation into environmental awareness and attitude with the general wellbeing and purpose survey. Increased response rates over time are in themselves a reflection of improving engagement among the workforce.
Care needs to be taken to avoid bias when wording the questions. If you want a true indication of your people’s thoughts, an overlay of your unconscious preference will skew the results. That in itself is a good reason to employ an impartial outsider to develop, analyse and report on the research.
When Should I Carry Out an Employee Engagement Survey?
At Coral Mountain, we recommend a survey for benchmarking as part of the second stage – AIMS – of the FOUR ‘A’ SERVICE, once the organisation has committed to the process of developing a Sustainability Culture and not before. The outcomes ot this employee engagement survey then guide the third stage, which is carrying out ACTIVITIES within the business.
Sharing the results falls into the vital element of communication planning. To find out more, please contact me for a no obligation conversation.
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