Response rate matters

Why response rate matters more than score

Michael Carden Engagement Leave a Comment

Pop quiz! What’s going to be more useful to you in the long run: a high engagement survey score with a low response rate, or a low engagement score with a high response rate? High engagement is good, right? Low is bad? You want to know if you have a highly engaged workforce, so you need as many survey responses as you can get. Ideally 100%. Definitely more than the 10-15% you can expect from surveying complete strangers. Response rate matters. Surveys are an average of opinions… of those who bother responding When do you leave a hotel review online? …

EX18 Awards NZ

EX18: NZ’s First EVER Employee Experience Awards

Karen Rayner Employee experience, Joyous Labs 1 Comment

Do your people love what they do and do what they love?  Are you keen to showcase and celebrate what an awesome workplace you are?  If so, read on! The awesome guys at Humankind will be launching New Zealand’s first ever Employee Experience Awards in 2018 in partnership with Joyous. The EX18 Awards, which celebrate organisations throughout New Zealand who are leading the way delivering exceptional experiences to their people and therefore known as the best employers in the country, will be launching 3rd June, with the overall winners announced 8th November. Founder of Humankind, Samantha Gadd, is passionate about …

Employee experience 101

Employee Experience 101

Karen Rayner Employee experience Leave a Comment

Employee experience is kind of a big deal, and we all know it. It might not be the future of HR (though it probably is), but it’s something everyone needs to pay attention to. And while it might sound like the sort of thing that involves catered breakfasts and foosball tables, it’s significantly more complex. So, for the uninitiated, what exactly is employee experience? And what isn’t it? Employee experience defined There’s no single universally accepted definition of employee experience, but everyone’s on pretty much the same page. Basically everything about work that makes employees think or act a certain …

Open source employee engagement

Open source employee engagement

Karen Rayner Employee experience, Engagement, Joyous Labs, Open source Leave a Comment

Employee engagement has become an industry centered around surveys. Companies compete on who has the best, the biggest, the most comprehensive solution – despite the fact there’s not much difference between any of them. After all, there’s only so many ways to ask employees how engaged they are in their work… Because survey companies are competing on proprietary knowledge, a couple of things are going to happen. Firstly they need to find a special something that sets them apart from the competition, which requires R&D. Then they need to hire sales and marketing guys to tell everyone what that difference …

Fairness is an employee experience thing

Fairness is an employee experience thing

Philip Carden Employee experience, Engagement, Rewards & recognition 3 Comments

Fairness is a thing. More of a thing than it used to be. A thing with the ability to upset elections and change voting patterns. Democracy has delivered a few well-deserved reminders of late that people really do care about fairness. Those people are voters and customers. They are also employees. The science of measuring of employee engagement and mood is well-established. And while it is straightforward to demonstrate the connection between engagement and enterprise value, it’s  difficult to translate better measurements into building a better employee experience. It often feels like we get tied up in theory and reporting …

The observer effect is not about cats in boxes

The observer effect:  the surprising role of structured questions

Philip Carden Employee experience, Engagement, Feedback, Motivation

How do we measure things like engagement and experience? We ask questions. But what if asking the question changes the very thing we are trying to measure? Here’s a newsflash: That’s exactly what happens. And it’s not a bad thing — in fact it’s a huge opportunity, because the questions themselves can be subtle but powerful change agents. The observer effect: simply observing a situation or phenomenon necessarily changes that phenomenon (a fact commonly cited in physics). We’re huge fans of open questions, but here are three good reasons why interactions should start with carefully chosen structured questions. Three good reasons that …

The anonymity paradox

The Anonymity Paradox

Michael Carden Employee experience, Engagement, Feedback 1 Comment

Communication is a spectrum. On the left is face to face. On the right is a YouTube comment section. In the middle are all manner of different ways of connecting. Bluetooth phone calls while driving. Group WhatsApp with those folk you met at a festival. Teleconferences where one dude is at an airport and only ever remembers to press mute before he starts talking. Each of these different ways of communicating has its own rules of acceptable behavior. There’s probably things you’d say in an email that you’d not say face to face. I’ve certainly found myself on written rants …