Improving your revenues and evolving your business with impactful actions in the GCC
Ibrahim Mougharbel
It is imperative in these days to actively listen to your employees, via continuous pulse surveys, to check how they are feeling and how you can best enable performance and trust across your organization. The Era of Great Resignation, is here and impacting organizations in the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, and employees are on the hunt for workplaces prioritizing their people.
In our culture coaching session, we are always asked by leaders on what they should be focusing on as priorities to drive revenues and financial growth, and the main tip is to activate the listening strategy, by launching an external employee engagement survey to gather candid and confidential feedback.
So, what an external employee engagement survey should help you understand:
- Employees perception and experience
- What help them to become a high performer
- What enable their value proposition
The insights out the survey will support organizations, either private, public or governmental in the GCC, to improve employee engagement, increase employee retention and drive business objectives and potentially revenues.
Why is it important to activate your listening strategy as an organization?
A 3rd party employee engagement survey helps you understand how engaged your employees are – both with their scope of work, their teams and with the overall organization – and provide you with an accurate and impactful action plan that will help businesses and organizations meet their business objectives.
What is the impact of the survey on the business?
An employee engagement survey opens your leader’s eyes on the good and the bad, while focusing on your organization’s best practices and areas of opportunity, and why your culture, innovation, performance, and further slicing and dicing by departments and managers, are impacted by all the above?
The key question is, are your employees driven by your business objectives, mission, vision and leaders – how can I get my company culture to the next level?
What steps are required for an effective and impactful action plan?
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1. Slicing and dicing of data, and identifying gaps by demographics and departments
- Do you want to understand how employee engagement varies across organizational departments?
- Do you need to diagnose which demographic groups feel less engaged in their work than others, and why?
Our employee experience survey enables you to customize your survey with demographic questions unique to your organization, equipping you with actionable insights to improve employee engagement.
2. Assign KPIs to your survey results, as an overall organization and by demographics and departments
Convincing executives in the GCC region that company culture matters can be difficult, but it is possible. Many executive teams are curious about employee opinions but do not have access to the frontline or middle management in a meaningful way. A focused survey is a great way to get executives preliminary feedback so they can understand where they may want to dig deeper.
For best results, talk to key leaders within your organization to determine what is most important to them:
- What kind of data do they want to see from an employee engagement survey?
- What are the organization’s goals for the year and how does an employee engagement survey fit into those goals?
This should determine some of the survey questions and demographics (such as department, locations etc.) you might want to add to your employee engagement survey.
A successful survey starts and ends with great communication
3. Drum up excitement among your people in every country you operate in within the Middle East
Now that everyone is aligned and you are ready to prep and launch your employee engagement survey, communicate to employees why you are asking for their feedback.
Emphasizing the why will ultimately increase engagement and survey participation. Knowing and believing the “what’s in it for me?” will make employees eager to provide honest, direct and detailed feedback.
A successful survey starts and ends with great communication as it leads to more engagement and buy-in from all areas of the business.
4. Launch your survey by country or all together at the same time
When you run an employee survey through Great Place to Work, you will see real-time participation numbers, which allows you to remind or encourage employees to submit their responses. You’ll also gain access to the most comprehensive employee experience data set, spanning over 30 years of surveying employees around the country and the world.
5. Benchmark your results locally, regionally, globally, by industry, by demographic
Compare the experience of your employees with credible benchmark data and gain an independent perspective about how well you perform compared to other companies in the UAE, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait, KSA, Bahrain, Middle East, Industry, Demographic, Women, Millennials, Parents, etc.
By measuring your employee engagement scores against benchmarks, you can identify what employees expect from industries and companies. This is vital intel for closing culture gaps and improving employee engagement and retention.
Benchmarking can also help you define a clear employee value proposition by understanding what makes your organization unique relative to others. A strong and distinct employee value proposition will help you stand apart from other workplaces, refine your marketing messages and attract the right candidates in the GCC region.
6. It is all about culture coaching and actively evolving
You have completed your survey and uncovered a treasure trove of valuable employee feedback. Now, the work begins: Using your results, you must figure out where your strengths and areas of opportunity lie.
First and foremost, thank employees for participating in the survey and sharing their candid feedback. Let them know you appreciate their responses and will be spending some time diving into the results.
Once you have developed a robust list of questions, curiosities and observations about your data, it’s time to share them with the wider company. Interpreting results is a key first step, but creating a clear action plan to share with employees is crucial.
With our employee survey tool, you can easily download reports with meaningful charts and benchmarks that make it easy to present the results to the broader company and identify your strengths and what is undermining your culture.
To improve your employee experience, measure your employee experience
If you have questions about running employee experience surveys, or you’re ready to launch your own, reach out to us. We’re here to help gather the information you need to make the right decisions for your employees and your organization.
Keep an eye on the best companies in your region or industry and meet employees’ needs and expectations with our employee experience survey and benchmarking.
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