If you already work with the team here at ClearlyRated, you hopefully think of us as a trusted partner that helps your organization measure and act upon the experience of your clients (and in staffing, your placed talent). I am incredibly proud to announce that ClearlyRated is launching a new addition to our offerings: a survey specifically designed to measure and improve employee satisfaction within your organization! Why an Internal Employee Satisfaction Survey? For B2B service providers, the engagement and happiness of clients is paramount to your success as an organization. And, more than anything, we at ClearlyRated believe it’s good business to place the client experience at the heart of your growth strategy. But who is responsible for supporting your clients? Who offers your key contacts exceptional levels of service to keep them coming back, and who inspires them to share their positive experience with their networks? And, in the staffing industry, who ensures that candidates, job seekers, and talent that you place on assignment feel supported and advocated for by your firm? Your employees, of course. And their happiness and job satisfaction matters too. The members of your internal team are the lifeblood of your clients’ experiences. In order to realize the business benefits that come from providing a world-class client experience—benefits like retaining critical revenue, building your firm’s reputation, and differentiating based on the caliber of service you provide—your internal employees must feel deeply engaged with your organization and your commitment to service excellence. But the importance of asking for feedback from your internal team and measuring the satisfaction of your employees has far-reaching implications beyond the client experience. Keeping a pulse on your team’s engagement and their satisfaction within the workplace can save your organization an immense amount of money. Employee turnover represents a huge expense to your business. Beyond the out-of-pocket costs to recruit, interview, hire, onboard, and train new employees, your firm also forfeits any of the revenue that an employee who leaves your organization previously supported or would have brought in after the time of their departure. Even after you’ve hired a replacement, the time it takes to ramp a new employee to the productivity levels of a high earner is likely in the neighborhood of 6 months. As all of our businesses face the continued journey of navigating uncertainty in the time of COVID-19, it’s more important than ever to find ways to engage with and nurture the experience your team members are having as they continue to fight to keep your organization healthy. The truth is that any disruption to “business-as-somewhat-usual” is compounded by COVID-19, and the same is true for employee turnover. Unexpectedly losing a key employee creates outsized disruption in uncertain times. Now is most certainly the time to be investing in a program to support your understanding of your employees’ perspectives, experience, and satisfaction with your company. Last, but certainly not least, employers across the United States and Canada are facing a new call to action as it relates to their efforts around diversity, equity, and inclusion. With the global response to the death of George Floyd and the public outcry of the business community at-large, companies of all shapes and sizes are “leaning in” to big conversations about (and commitments to) anti-racism and anti-oppression. Beyond speaking up, companies that are truly invested in creating a world that is safe and inclusive for everyone must actively turn toward strategies that improve their organizational accountability to diversity, equity, and inclusion. And while diversity is something firms can actively build towards with hiring and management practices, you will only understand your progress towards equity and inclusion by asking your team about their experiences in the workplace. An employee satisfaction survey can, and should, help your firm understand how every member of your staff (regardless of age, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, religion, national origin, disability/abilities, veteran status, and socioeconomic background) perceives their own safety, inclusion, and worth in light of stated company goals and unspoken company culture. Because diversity, equity, and inclusion is not just about what your workforce looks like, it’s about how they experience working for and with you. Introducing ClearlyRated’s Employee Satisfaction Survey for B2B Service Firms The ClearlyRated Employee Satisfaction Survey is designed to help B2B service firms invite productive, actionable feedback from their internal staff. With this employee survey, firm leadership can proactively measure internal employee sentiment with the Net Promoter® Score (NPS®). This key metric will allow your company’s leadership to do the following: (1) benchmark employee satisfaction against other companies in your industry, (2) identify opportunities for improved employee engagement, and (3) earn an award for exceptional employee satisfaction in their industry, if employee satisfaction scores meet thresholds of excellence. How it Works Ask for Feedback Every member of your internal staff will receive an email inviting them to complete a 20-question survey about their experience at your firm. In addition to the Net Promoter® question, which asks employees how likely are they to recommend your company to a friend or colleague on a scale of 0 to 10, the survey will ask staff about their perceptions of optimism, community, fairness, recognition, advancement, feedback, pride, belonging, meritocracy, and diversity as it relates to working for your organization. The survey ends with a few demographic questions to help categorize results and boost analysis. All employee feedback will be reported anonymously, meaning that there will be no way to trace a specific response back to an individual team member. While this is a departure from the process that we use to support client and placed-talent satisfaction surveys, anonymous feedback is a critical practice for matters of internal employee satisfaction. We are asking your staff to be as transparent as possible about their experience working for your company, and only by anonymizing their feedback can we expect them to be candid and honest. Gather, Analyze, and Take Action on Anonymous Feedback Once your internal employees have completed their surveys, you and your leadership team will be able to review, analyze, and segment feedback in the same survey dashboard where you monitor client and placed-talent survey responses. Responses are gathered real-time, with issue notifications that will trigger email alerts when a member of your team responds with a 0 to 6 on the Net Promoter scale (i.e. when you receive a Detractor response). These optional notifications help you stay in close sync with issues as they are identified anonymously in the survey. In addition to real-time Detractor notifications, the ClearlyRated survey dashboard and reporting features make it simple and easy for you to examine trends in employee feedback and identify key areas for improvement in an effort to better serve your team and avoid turnover. Leadership must be involved in analyzing and taking action on feedback if you hope to move the needle on employee engagement. Once you’ve received your employee satisfaction survey results, set aside time for your leadership and management teams to review and discuss. The emphasis, of course, needs to be on how you will take action with the feedback that’s been generated. Create a plan for communicating key takeaways back to the team, and set targets for any specific behaviors or outcomes that you would like to improve between now and your next employee satisfaction survey. Invite Testimonials from Engaged Employees Members of your internal team will be invited to share what they like best about working at your company so that you may share it anonymously online or use it as part of your recruiting materials. These testimonials will of course be anonymous, and they will provide valuable perspective that can be added to your hiring materials, to your website, or shared on social media with our handy social sharing feature. Encourage Team Members to Recognize One Another with Shout Outs Your staff will also be invited to recognize their peers, colleagues, and fellow team members with ClearlyRated’s Shout Outs feature. Each Shout Out generates an email notification, which can be distributed to your internal team in whatever capacity is most efficient and powerful for you. Some of the ways that we see Shout Outs highlighted are: Shout Out bulletin boards, where positive feedback is printed out and posted locally. Highlighting high achievers on social media feeds or other external communication channels, either directly through the social sharing options within the survey dashboard or through your own social content-creation process. Sharing feedback individually, as part of performance reviews or other 1:1s. Calling out recognized individuals during internal all-hands meetings. Or how we do it here at ClearlyRated: Allowing the Shout Outs to come to the entire team, so we can all celebrate everyone’s success! Earn an Employee Satisfaction Award from ClearlyRated As with our client and placed talent surveys, ClearlyRated will be validating employee survey responses for all participating firms, and for those who meet certain eligibility criteria, we will administer an award recognizing that firm for their outstanding efforts towards internal employee satisfaction. Measure Your Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Efforts As a part of your employee satisfaction survey, your team members will be invited to answer three questions aimed at assessing their perceptions of equity and inclusion in the workplace. Belonging: I [always / sometimes / never / don’t know] feel like I belong at this firm. Meritocracy: The best people [always / sometimes / never / don’t know] get promoted, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation or identity, education, or disability. Support Diversity: Management [always / sometimes / never / don’t know] shows that diversity is important through its actions. All firms participating in our Employee Satisfaction Survey will see their team’s answers to these questions reported in their dashboard. Firms who elect to upgrade to Plus or Enterprise subscriptions (to support additional segmentation or customization of the questions) will receive an additional report offering segmented cuts of this data to examine perceptions by demographic group, allowing them to delve further into their opportunities to improve equity and inclusion among their team. Don’t Lose Sight of Employee Satisfaction During This Critical Time 2020 has been a year for the books. Businesses across the U.S. and Canada expected a historically tight labor market and high demand for internal staff. Instead, we’re adjusting to a historic drop in employment, learning how to operate during a global pandemic, and working to respond appropriately to both employees’ concerns and increased pressure to address long-standing internal inequities as a result of the conversations sparked by the George Floyd protests. There has never been a more important time to be in touch with the sentiment and engagement of your internal staff. My hope is that the ClearlyRated Employee Satisfaction Survey program offers you a robust, reliable, and timely method for measuring the employee experience at your firm, and that it allows you to take steps to ensure that all members of your team feel engaged, included, and supported to do their very best work. Getting Started with ClearlyRated’s Internal Employee Satisfaction Survey Program If you already work with us to measure the experience of your clients or placed talent, simply reach out to your Customer Success Manager to learn more about the Internal Employee Satisfaction Survey process! If you are new to ClearlyRated and would like to learn how we are helping B2B service providers leverage NPS for organizational growth, please contact us today!
