Staffing issues are always high on the agenda when I catch-up with DBA members. For a business leader it often feels like their day is filled with either trying to find the right staff or figuring out how to make sure they don’t lose key employees from the business. A high value is rightly placed on keeping staff happy and productive.

There are many ways of building employee engagement, but the most useful way to gauge how successful you are is through an employee engagement survey.

At their core, employee engagement surveys are about staff retention, because recruiting is an expensive and imperfect process. They give you an insight into how your staff feel about the business and their working life. They are the equivalent of a miner’s canary, allowing a business to take action in a specific area of the business – to solve issues before they become problems. The case for pursuing employee engagement is pretty clear-cut with research by Gallup showing that disengaged employees cost their employers between £3,400 and £10,000 in wasted salary*.

Like many things in life, if you are going to do an employee engagement survey you need to do it well, and you need to repeat it on a regular basis. How would you feel if your opinion was sought only once every 3 years? Or ad-hoc when the business has time or inclination? That’s why the DBA Employee Engagement Survey takes place annually, so that members can regularly benefit from the insight it provides. The 2020 survey will be open in April, with the results available in early June.

The DBA Employee Engagement Survey can work well alongside any engagement activity you already undertake, as it allows you to benchmark your score against the rest of the DBA membership. A score on a particular metric will be useful for you to measure on an ongoing basis, but you gain an advantage if you know it is higher or lower than the average of DBA members – other agencies that could potentially be the next employer of some of your key staff.

DBA member Make It Clear encouraged their staff to complete the survey last year and were extremely pleased with the results, allowing them to promote the fact that their employees were engaged with the business, highlighting that they “feel they can be themselves at work and believe in the company goals”. See how they’ve shared news of their employees’ satisfaction.

Further details about the 2020 DBA Employee Engagement Survey will be sent to you this Spring, but if you have any questions in the meantime, please contact Eleanor.singh@dba.org.uk – especially if there is a specific person in the business that we should be liaising with on HR matters.

Read more about the benefits of the DBA Employee Engagement Survey here.

Not yet a DBA member? If you’re interested in finding out about the many benefits of membership including the DBA Employee Engagement Survey, please get in touch.

*Research by Gallup has shown that disengaged employees cost their employers between £3,400 and £10,000 in wasted salary and cost the overall economy £52-£70 billion a year. And the UK actually exhibits the worst figures in Europe when it comes to lost productivity.  

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