If you conduct an employee survey in your company, you probably expect positive, or at least good, results in terms of employee satisfaction or employee health. You can read here how you can react quickly if the survey does not meet your expectations or wishes.

Using 3 simple steps as an example, I will show you how to pick up your employees. How do you find the causes of below-average satisfaction and well-being levels in the company?

Feeling good at work used to be a thing of the past. Now it has happened, you have it in black and white, the result of the last employee survey. And the result is not at all satisfactory. What do you do now? You have to communicate the result to the Management Board and the employees are also waiting for feedback.

Admittedly, the last few weeks and months have been particularly challenging and well-being at work has been somewhat neglected. Your employees are generally burdened by environmental conditions such as inflation, the rising cost of living and multiple crises. However, the loss of a major order last fall has also reduced confidence within the company. The measures introduced by the management did not lead to any real reassurance. So stress and strain have become the new “NORMAL”.

Unfortunately, some colleagues have also been absent due to illness in the meantime, and some will not be back for some time. Impending retirements and the suspension of admissions are creating a heavy workload. As you can see, feeling good at work is different.

What criteria are decisive for well-being in the workplace?

Have you designed the survey in such a way that key individual aspects for the lack of well-being at work can be identified, because in the current situation you need to know which starting points are really relevant and important or what is really behind the negative assessments. So how good is your knowledge of the current challenges? Better linked’s own studies among HR managers have shown that there is often a large knowledge gap in terms of really knowing how employees are really doing in the company and what is currently bothering employees.

But you need this knowledge now. A common problem in employee surveys is that you often work with predefined statements that have to be kept as general as possible so that they are suitable for as many employees as possible. After all, the statements should be just as applicable in production and logistics as in the IT or marketing team and also apply to colleagues on the sales floor.

If you do not generalize here, you have already lost, but of course you know little about what the individual colleagues really understand by the statement and how they interpret it for their own area. Although you can probably filter the results according to individual areas (if this does not jeopardize the anonymity of the employees), or cluster them according to other (socio-demographic) criteria, you will often not make any significant progress in terms of knowledge. You can only guess at a weak point in the system, i.e. what the causes of the poor employee survey really are.

Your management responsibility as a human resources manager now calls for solutions. Your management board will be the first to ask for them.

After a sobering result for you in the employee survey, you should be able to offer QUICK WINS that have a positive impact on well-being in the workplace.

What I mean by this is that you need to implement credible and sustainable measures to address employees in their stressful situation. Of course, it cannot be assumed that you can improve well-being at work overnight, otherwise you would probably have already done so and the employee survey would have delivered a better result.

Many companies are now focusing on behavioral prevention instead of relationship prevention

In order to increase well-being in the workplace, many companies are now taking measures to deal with stressors at the individual level of employees. After all, the perception of stress is individual, so stress can only be dealt with on a personal level. Of course, many employees are happy to take advantage of individual offers, because they really do feel stressed.

Training courses and workshops can also help to reduce the challenges faced by individual employees. Anyone who feels stressed will seek help accordingly, you hope as a manager.

With this approach, you are probably creating an opportunity for employees who are under a lot of stress to be picked up, but you are not solving any problems and you are not taking any sustainable measures to get to the root of the difficult survey results. You are offering a solution that scratches the surface.

However, in order to really solve the problem in the long term and create a real sense of well-being in the workplace , you need to change the circumstances and work on your corporate culture and structure. In most cases, challenges run deeper.

We often see their effects, namely poor results in the employee survey, when several environmental conditions come together. However, differentiating between causes and effects or adjusting the actual relevant factors requires more than a few general statements.

To achieve a real change towards well-being at work, you need to address the causes

Identifying the causes is neither easy nor a QUICK WIN, but if you get involved, you and your employees will experience an increased sense of well-being at work despite high workloads or challenging environmental conditions.

I will give you 3 simple steps for this procedure:

Create a trusting environment and provide your team with their own safe space

For such a confidential topic as the day-to-day challenges your employees face, you need a dedicated safe space for communication. Your employees need to be able to open up further and address the structural and cultural problems that they perceive as their own individual stressors in their day-to-day work.

There needs to be a safe space in which communication is possible at eye level and employees can talk openly about stress without fear of negative consequences. Your employees feel that their issues are taken seriously and valued. Your employees feel that they are being listened to and seen, you want to initiate real change.

Admittedly, it will probably take some courage, but just a few days after you have received below-average scores in the employee survey, you can signal to your team that we have understood and are interested in sustainably improving the work situation. Well-being at work should not just be a buzzword in your next publication, but something that everyone can feel in their everyday lives.

By registering your employees individually on betterlinked.eu, we ensure that employees only appear on Safe Spaces within your company using a nickname they have created themselves. This means that your employees are completely ANONYMOUS on the platform and only those people who actually work in your company have access.

Involve all employees in finding a solution

Especially if your challenges in the company are on a cultural or structural level, use the knowledge of all employees to address or uncover stressors. Everyone has already successfully solved stress problems and your employees can actively participate and support other colleagues ANONYMOUSLY.

Mutual solidarity, especially from more resilient colleagues, creates trust, recommendations have already proven valuable within your framework and have already been tried and tested. By communicating with your employees, you receive exactly the information you need to identify the drivers for a lack of well-being in the workplace – in the language of your employees and not through an anonymous statement.

Of course, communication on the platform is moderated and accompanied by experts. We provide regular support with valuable, short WIRKshops.

To make changes traceable, you need data

The communication data is analyzed openly and transparently by a supporting AI, which helps to distinguish causes from effects and make the underlying factors for the stressful employee surveys visible. Based on anonymized data, you will find out which starting points you need to work onand which topics are the strongest drivers to achieve sustainable improvement in your company. We focus exclusively on the content of the issues, as anonymization rules out any reference to individuals.

WIN-WIN-WIN

Satisfied employees lead to more satisfied customers and higher productivity!

Do you know that companies that are committed to well-being at work 3!fach(experts for workplace culture and employer attractiveness (greatplacetowork.de) are more successful?