Manager enablement for engagement surveys

This article contains best practices for enabling your managers with their engagement data and includes the following sections:

• How do I prepare my leaders/managers to "do" engagement?
• Should I give my leaders/managers access?
• Manager Results Live Email Template

How do I prepare my leaders/managers to "do" engagement?

This section contains best practices on involving the next level of leadership in the engagement process.

1. Understand and act on your own engagement data. If the C-suite doesn't believe it and do it, folks under you will be slower to buy in.
2. Call a meeting with your direct reports. We’ve created this short presentation deck to help you explain why this matters and what to do about it. There are three parts: 1) What is employee engagement? 2) Why should I care? 3) What do I do now?
3. Give your manager(s) access to their results. Here's how.
4. Expect them to pick "1 thing" to act on. They can use our action planning tool to guide them through selecting an action. If you have a manager(s) who needs some extra help either to get on board or to walk through this, ask your Strategist for help.
5. Encourage and hold them accountable. Remind managers that perfection is the enemy of progress. We want each manager to "own" his/her action by sharing it with their team and doing it. Sometimes talking about these actions with peers is very encouraging.
   How are you going to hold them accountable to act? Will they turn in their worksheet, or will they have a 1:1 meeting with you to discuss this? If there’s no accountability, there will be little action and therefore little results and even employee doubt in the survey process.

Each of these five steps is crucial for the effective adoption of the engagement process. Don’t do it halfway. If you’re bought in, your direct reports will follow, and your organization after that.

Should I give my leaders/managers access?

Yes! The only way you can make true engagement change is by making a cultural shift, and you can't do that alone.

“When is the right time?”

We recommend bringing in leaders in waves by authority level, and that entire authority level at the same time to avoid creating circles of distrust or misinformation.

Some organizations move faster through this process than others. If you have greater than 500 employees, it usually takes closer to 9 months (or 3 surveys) to work through the key layers of the org chart down to line-level managers.

With less than 500 employees, all layers of authority can often be included in 6 months (or 2 surveys).

You should follow the same process with each authority layer as you give them access to their data.

This strategic adoption down the organization ensures that not only do people understand how to use their engagement data, but they believe in it and trust that it will work to make changes in their teams.

Confidentiality

Not all people leaders will be able to see their team's results. 15Five always follows the Rule of 5 for engagement surveys, which states we only show results for groups that have 5+ respondents. While this may feel frustrating to some, this is for the protection of the employees and managers.

As always, let us know if you have any other questions. We’re here to help. Email our Support Team at support@15five.com.

Manager Results Live Email Template

Here's an email template to notify managers when their data is ready.

Team,

As of this morning, your team's engagement results are live at engage.15five.com. Please sign in and view your team's results.

One of our goals as an organization is for our people to be extremely engaged, and we can't do that unless leaders at every level are involved. Don't forget that there is also a significant personal benefit for you in humbly submitting yourself to this process. You can't get better and we can't get better unless we objectively identify strengths to double down on and areas of growth to commit to action.

Thank you for your commitment to this process. We're going to get better because we will do this together.

[Your Name]