Employee engagement surveys have become important tools for understanding workforce health. They help organizations monitor how employees feel about their workplace experience and can reveal valuable insights into morale, connection, and retention risk.
But employee experiences do not exist in the abstract. They show up through day-to-day workplace behaviors — how managers respond to difficult conversations, whether employees feel comfortable speaking up, or how teams support one another.
Understanding both employee sentiment and workplace behavior creates a more complete picture of organizational health.
There’s much to be said for measuring employee engagement
Employee engagement, or sentiment surveys, are tried-and-true tools in talent leaders' strategies to accurately assess, support, and strengthen workers' connections to their organizations.
Links between engagement and productivity, performance, morale, well-being, and—perhaps most importantly—retention are well-documented. Those relationships make companies' often substantial spends on engagement surveys important workforce investments.
Engagement survey data can also provide valuable insights into organizational culture, managerial effectiveness, employer branding, and progress on initiatives. It often pinpoints learning and development needs or identifies potential issues before escalation.
Traditional engagement surveys have flaws
While companies derive undeniable benefits from engagement surveys, the instruments aren't without their drawbacks. Included among those:
- They capture generalized employee sentiment data and miss the nuances behind the sentiment expressed.
- The information (particularly data indicating dissatisfaction) is often difficult to interpret making it frustrating for executives to take action.
- Employees can try to "game the system" and give the answers they think the organization wants to hear.
- Survey fatigue and non-response give organizations only a partial view of their organization.
It is no wonder that, despite engagement surveys being a vital tool, they ebb in and out of favor. But there is a better way.
Adding the power of contextual data
While companies derive undeniable benefits from engagement surveys, organizations often must seek additional information to better understand what is influencing employee perceptions.
Information can also be difficult to interpret, leaving leaders asking questions like:
- "Why might employees feel this way?"
- "What behaviors or experiences are contributing to these results?"
Capturing employee data in a specific context is one way that can be done.
In-context surveying involves assessing employees' attitudes and perceptions about a workplace behavior while they're learning about it.
In learning and development (L&D), in-context surveying involves assessing employees' attitudes and perceptions about a workplace behavior while they're learning about it. For example, if an organization's managers are training to initiate difficult conversations with direct reports, it's helpful to get a sense of the managers' feelings about conflict and their own abilities to handle employee defensiveness or anger—issues that often arise in difficult conversations.
To provide in-context surveying, Atana courses embed validated behavioral questions asked within the context of vicarious workplace experiences. The analytics stemming from this data provide clear indicators of employee attitudes and intentions that engagement surveys simply can't deliver.
Having a solution that both teaches behaviors and measures behavioral intent, like the one provided by Atana, is appealing to L&D teams because they don’t have to design questions or interpret responses. Assessments are engineered into Atana courses, and the analysis is done automatically through the Atana Insights platform. The data is then presented in a user-friendly dashboard.
Other organizational benefits from adding in-context surveying to engagement data
Through its ongoing methodological innovations and unique approach, Atana enhances the accuracy of data collected, and provides feedback that more accurately reflects true employee behaviors and attitudes while facilitating more effective organizational interventions.
- More Complete Data, gathered via behavioral assessment embedded in mandatory training, ensures near-universal (versus low or voluntary) participation. This eliminates data skew and guarantees population truth.
- Blind Spots Are Detected as the vicarious learning scenarios get learners involved with what's being asked. Behavioral questions asked in the context of the scenarios yield real assessment about behavioral intent, not "the answers they think you want to hear," often uncovering issues that had been hidden under the surface.
- Actionable Insights are provided instead of generalized results or complex data needing interpretation. Answers to the science-backed questions are analyzed by our data scientists and depicted on a dashboard with behavioral indicators by team, role, and geographic location. Our AI Assistant and Playbooks enable you to take precision action and achieve surgical resource deployment and maximized budget efficiency.
Meaningful results achieved
Behavior change relies on an employee's intentions. That intent is shaped by their attitudes, their abilities, and the support they receive from others. Atana captures that information helping to further illuminate issues that company engagement queries may have revealed. Pairing Atana insights with data from other internal surveys can produce powerful results that help L&D drive positive progress from individual to organizational levels.
About the Author
Amanda Hagman Ph.D. | Chief Scientist, Behavioral Data Science
Dr. Hagman is an expert in behavior change and intervention science, adept at turning data into practical solutions that drive meaningful change in workplace behaviors. With a background in program evaluation and learning analytics, she uses predictive insights to foster positive behavioral outcomes on a large scale. As head of research at Atana, Dr. Hagman integrates behavioral change principles into training courses tackling common workplace issues. Her work targeting critical behavioral goals is designed to deliver concrete and lasting improvements for organizations.
