Medallia
Reach™Employee Engagement Made Simple
Why Traditional HR Surveys Fail the Impact Test
Employee feedback programs. Most companies run them, but few companies fully benefit from them. Often they become cumbersome, HR-driven consulting exercises that not only don't drive improvement, but actually bore and disengage employees. Employees dutifully fill out thoughtful responses, but they quickly learn to expect few results.
A Revolution In Employee Engagement
Medallia set out to reinvent employee engagement programs, removing the traditional obstacles to their success and unleashing the power of frontline engagement. The result is Medallia Reach, an employee engagement program that’s completely different. It is specifically designed to reach operational managers and deliver frontline results.
Words in focus
- Displays powerful employee comments while preserving confidentiality
- Tags and categorizes responses—automatically or manually— to track topics and sentiment
Reach Index or Employee Promoter Score (EPS)
- Simple measure that everyone can unite around
- Choice of Medallia Reach Index or EPS
- EPS version complements customer Net Promoter Score (NPS)-based programs
Issues resolved
- Built-in issue resolution process addresses individual problems uncovered by program
- Employees can request follow-up contact and choose contact person from a list
- Post-survey discussions clarify issues, teach organization, and usually make employees feel a lot better
Simple to understand, simple to implement
- Concise 10-question questionnaire: long enough to cover all key elements of employee engagement, short enough to maintain employee engagement during survey
- Economical and easy to implement, so surveys become part of how you do business, not a series of special, one-off projects
Fresh and frequent
- Continuous or periodic fielding
- Real-time HQ reporting
- Real-time or quarterly frontline reporting
Integrated with customer experience data
- Live feed into existing Medallia customer experience system
- Combined customer and employee trends displayed on Medallia dashboard
- Research consulting on the linkage between employee engagement and the customer experience
- Integration with financial results
Plug-and-Play Employee Engagement
Surveying
- Multi-mode data collection to support literate and nonliterate employees
- Multi-language, to accommodate non-English speaking employees
- Anonymity: identification number or PIN code survey access; anonymous linkage of responses from the same employee for longitudinal trending
- Continuous or pulsed (at specific intervals) frequency depending on factors like workforce turnover
Reporting
- Customized to managers in each user group, facilitating identification of improvement actions
- Multi-language, so international locations participate equally
- Built-in benchmarks, including powerful intra-company rankings and external benchmarks
The 5 Sins of Traditional HR Programs
- 1 Long, repetitive questionnaires that frustrate
- More information is not necessarily better information. Long questionnaires, which generate lots of data requiring sophisticated statistical analysis, allow research firms to demonstrate competence and value-add. But they are hard on respondents and hinder action-oriented managers. When it comes to getting things done, a dozen precise questions are better than a hundred “interesting” ones.
- 2 Too many numbers; too few words
- Numbers are great for trending and benchmarking, but not for truly hearing employees. For that, you need words. Without words, employee feedback programs become mere ranking exercises that disengage operational managers, the very people responsible for creating customer engagement at the frontlines. By failing to fully leverage open-ended responses, traditional programs miss an opportunity.
- 3 Infrequent, lagging results that fail to capture managers attention
- Employee engagement is an ongoing process. But for busy operational managers, hard deadlines trump “shoulds” every time. When Employee Engagement gets on managers “to do” lists only once a year and is SOA (“Stale on Arrival”) due to months of administration, tabulation, and consulting work, it becomes a low priority. The result is one-off initiatives, not continuous improvement.
- 4 Lack of issue resolution, leaving individuals’ problems unaddressed
- Traditional programs focus almost exclusively on identifying aggregate trends, not on addressing employee-specific issues that surface. When participating employees flag specific problems in their survey responses but have no clear path to resolution, they may see the exercise as irrelevant. The company squanders an opportunity to fix a problem and win employee engagement.
- 5 Divorced from customer experience and business results
- Employee engagement, customer experience, and financial results are interdependent business outcomes. Traditional approaches rarely link the three in a practical way for the people who make engagement happen. The market research firm may include a “linkage” analysis in its final presentation, but rarely do frontline employees internalize and act on those conclusions.
