Engagement survey - focus on manual employees

Our organisation is made up of over 300 sites spread from the very north of Scotland to the tip of Cornwall. With many sites having as few as five employees our supervisors and managers are spread out widely, and often have responsibility for a number of sites at different locations. This has always presented us with the challenge of ensuring communication reaches our front line employees, as we are dependent on a management structure to cascade the information down.

In addition, monitoring of the engagement level of our manual employees is very difficult to do centrally. In light of these challenges the results of our recent employee engagement survey were particularly pleasing. Many challenges are still facing us as we strive to continually improve employee engagement, but the results for our manual employees (who account for approximately 80 per cent of our staff base) are something I feel very proud of and I decided to share a few survey highlights with you.

The survey reached a very impressive return rate of 58%, and we noted improvements in the level of managerial engagement across all questions for the manual employees. This included a significant increase in positive responses to the questions referring to interaction with line managers i.e. “My manager cares about how satisfied I am in my job” and “My manager motivates me to my best every day”.

We have also observed an improvement in the critical factor of ‘My team’. The data suggests that the ‘My team’ factor is one of the critical areas to many manual employees, and it shown by their comments in the survey.

The statement “People are treated fairly around here” also showed a significant improvement. Both sexes of the manual employee group showed excellent levels of engagement with female employees’ results being slightly higher. There were also significant improvements against the ‘caring’ factor which measures the degree to which a manager recognises employees have a life outside of work, and cares for their general wellbeing. Every age category in this employee group also showed excellent levels, with engagement being particularly high in the youngest and oldest employees.

As you know from my previous blog, this was our first year of addressing an extended version of the engagement survey to our manual staff and as you can see the results are very encouraging.