Employee Relations - Keeping Lots of People Always Happy
Hello hello!! If you're still reading this props, and thank you for being emotionally invested in me still having absolutely no idea what the end goal of my career is :)
Switching gears from talent acquisition (though I've still been doing a lot of that with two new jobs posted in the last two weeks), I've been focusing a lot of my time at redpepper on "employee relations." To me, I always thought these two words were incredibly vague and could encapsulate so many different categories of HR work. Although my last few weeks of experience have changed my mindset on employee relations slightly, I am still fascinated with how many different directions this work can go. While at redpepper, I've been heavily involved with researching and developing a quarterly employee engagement survey, which directly affects our ability to keep our employees not only satisfied with their redpepper experience, but also ensures that they continue to be the best advocates of our work.
My primary exposure to Employee Relations at redpepper came in the form of auditing and providing suggestions for how to revamp the current employee engagement survey, which is delivered quarterly. I was very interested in this project as I love feedback, and like that engagement surveys create a two-way conversation between the employer and employees. In my research preparing to audit the survey, I found many interesting facts about effective engagement surveys, some of which directly related to what we learned in Systematic Inquiry, like the importance of Likert Scales to ensure a consistent measurement mechanism (Talent Map, n.d.), and other things that I had never heard of before, like creating a large baseline survey in Q1 based on annual priorities with a mid-point evaluation in Q3, and then creating smaller, themed checkpoints in Q2 and Q4 (which I thought was really interesting!) (Croswell, n.d.). Ultimately, I really enjoyed this "tank-filling" (redpepper's word for research), and felt like a lot of the information I learned would be useful in my HR career going forward.
After completing this research, I got to sit down with my supervisor to present my findings and suggest changes to the quarterly survey. Together, we went through and changed the existing survey, and talked about potential larger changes to the survey, in the future. Some of the significant changes we made included changing the scale on some of the questions (they weren't fully ready to move to a Likert Scale for every question but it's in the works now!), better defining and clarifying all vocabulary used (especially company-specific terminology), and removing overlapping questions or questions that asked two things at once. It was really cool to see a lot of the concepts we discussed in Systematic Inquiry at work, and then to further combine that with best-practices research. I really enjoyed getting to be hands-on in the survey development process, and am excited to comb through the results of the survey and gather insights after it gets released to all employees in 2 days!
Moving forward, I hope to continue to help with the presentation of the employee engagement survey results, as well as get involved in other employee relations work. I realize that there is more to this category of HR than solely engagement surveys, and I can really see myself enjoying other projects in this functional area due to my passion for employee experience and retention in the workplace. Employee relations is definitely on my short-list of potential HR passion areas, but check back in in 2 weeks to see if benefits/compensation makes the list!
References
Switching gears from talent acquisition (though I've still been doing a lot of that with two new jobs posted in the last two weeks), I've been focusing a lot of my time at redpepper on "employee relations." To me, I always thought these two words were incredibly vague and could encapsulate so many different categories of HR work. Although my last few weeks of experience have changed my mindset on employee relations slightly, I am still fascinated with how many different directions this work can go. While at redpepper, I've been heavily involved with researching and developing a quarterly employee engagement survey, which directly affects our ability to keep our employees not only satisfied with their redpepper experience, but also ensures that they continue to be the best advocates of our work.
My primary exposure to Employee Relations at redpepper came in the form of auditing and providing suggestions for how to revamp the current employee engagement survey, which is delivered quarterly. I was very interested in this project as I love feedback, and like that engagement surveys create a two-way conversation between the employer and employees. In my research preparing to audit the survey, I found many interesting facts about effective engagement surveys, some of which directly related to what we learned in Systematic Inquiry, like the importance of Likert Scales to ensure a consistent measurement mechanism (Talent Map, n.d.), and other things that I had never heard of before, like creating a large baseline survey in Q1 based on annual priorities with a mid-point evaluation in Q3, and then creating smaller, themed checkpoints in Q2 and Q4 (which I thought was really interesting!) (Croswell, n.d.). Ultimately, I really enjoyed this "tank-filling" (redpepper's word for research), and felt like a lot of the information I learned would be useful in my HR career going forward.
After completing this research, I got to sit down with my supervisor to present my findings and suggest changes to the quarterly survey. Together, we went through and changed the existing survey, and talked about potential larger changes to the survey, in the future. Some of the significant changes we made included changing the scale on some of the questions (they weren't fully ready to move to a Likert Scale for every question but it's in the works now!), better defining and clarifying all vocabulary used (especially company-specific terminology), and removing overlapping questions or questions that asked two things at once. It was really cool to see a lot of the concepts we discussed in Systematic Inquiry at work, and then to further combine that with best-practices research. I really enjoyed getting to be hands-on in the survey development process, and am excited to comb through the results of the survey and gather insights after it gets released to all employees in 2 days!
References
Croswell, A. (n.d.).
Employee pulse survey best practices.
Retrieved from https://blog.cultureamp.com/best-practices-for-using-employee-engagement-pulse-surveys
Talent Map. (n.d.). The case for Likert’s five-point scale.
Retrieved from https://www.talentmap.com/five-point-likert-scale-employee-survey/
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