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EX Surveys: Why HR must analyse Leaders before Leadership

Updated: May 20, 2022


In this article discover and learn:

  • Why HR must analyse their leader EX before expecting people leaders to improve employee engagement. 4 minute read

  • Four steps to get HR started on analysis of their leader EX data. 10 minute read


The case for Leaders before Leadership in EX survey analysis

Leadership is critical to the employee experience. So when it comes to HR's executive recommendations from the latest EX survey, people leaders predictably become the conduit for improving EX "Our employee survey tells us we need people leaders who are authentic, who recognise people, give constructive feedback, communicate well, promote wellbeing and inclusion... " goes the list of expectations.


Yes good leadership is fundamental to a good EX, but is HR giving enough consideration to one of the most important precursors of good leadership? Are leaders engaged enough to lead?


In 2018 I led a study on employee experiences at law firms across the UK and Europe. These firms were investing in HR programs to attract and retain top talent. It turned out the biggest differentiator of high employee engagement was not any specific HR program. It came down to whether or not employees reported into engaged practice leaders.


Since that study I've seen this finding play out again and again with clients across other industries and geographies. For example at a government department employees were 40% more likely to be disengaged if their manager was too. At a major retail chain frontline employee engagement was best predicted by how engaged their managers were the previous year.


I asked Dr Seymour Adler, Global Leadership Assessment & Development Leader at Kincentric and a professor at New York's Hofstra University about this trend. Seymour told me that at Kincentric they've looked at data from hundreds of clients on this topic. He said they've found that disengaged leaders had twice the number of disengaged employees in their teams compared to engaged leaders.


Seymour says that "disengaged leaders can actually neutralise the effectiveness of HR programs designed to improve employee motivation". He mentioned cases where organisations will put employees through a formal employee recognition program in response to survey feedback, but the organisation sees no EX improvement because the issue of disengaged leaders had not been addressed.



It's for this reason that HR needs to take a systemic mindset in EX survey analysis. By segmenting people leaders in your analysis you could discover what might be holding them back from improving their team's EX.


Four steps to get HR started on leader EX analysis


1. Check the engagement scores of your organisation's leadership structure

This is an easy analysis. With your EXM platform segment your results by each leadership group in your organisation. Now compare the scores by seniority.

In a healthy organisation the most senior leadership group should be the most engaged. A slight decline in engagement as you progress through your leadership structure towards frontline supervisors is normal.


Check for obvious dysfunctional trends. For example are there any disengaged leadership groups? Are frontline employees more engaged than their leaders? Is one leadership group experiencing a decline in engagement whilst others are improving?


2. Refine your analysis with job level benchmark

HR should keep in mind that leadership populations tend to answer employee surveys more positively than frontline employees. Default benchmarks provided by many survey vendors compare your leaders to benchmarks made up of mostly frontline employees.


By applying job level benchmarks hidden risks and opportunities in the data become easier to spot. For example take the chart below. This organisation's people leaders appear more engaged than frontline employees on the horizontal axis (62% vs 55%). When we look at job role benchmarks on the vertical axis a potential issue with the people leader group becomes visible. They are the only group trending below job level benchmarks.



When the above analysis caught the attention of this organisation's executive team they acknowledged this people leader group lacked any real empowerment as "leaders". This group had no budget to recognise their people, salary decisions for their direct reports were outside their control and structurally many had only one or two direct reports.


Executives realised the frontline people leader role needed be transformed into a more engaging one. They also realised the population could function better as a talent succession pipeline for more senior roles. Without job level benchmarks, it would have been harder to spot the issue and get this impetus for action.


3. Identify if any experiences stand out in your leader EX

In this analysis you compare your leadership group's EX survey scores against another meaningful comparison. The objective is to use comparison data to spot potential issues. Meaningful comparisons could include the historical survey scores for your group, job level benchmarks or a simple comparison to the organisation overall.


In the example below this organisation had an executive team with a relatively low engagement score. The executive team's EX scores were compared with the rest of the company:


The analysis suggests something is amiss with how the executive team experience their people manager (the CEO). It turned out the performance of the CEO was under review by company's board at the time. When I last spoke to the HR Director at this organisation, he told me this analysis later contributed to the CEO's decision to resign.


4. Identify what needs focus to improve leader EX using predictive analytics

HR should keep in mind that the lowest EX scores on a survey are not necessarily the priority EX issues to be focusing on. Pay is a good example of this. Pay as a survey topic tends to score low, but pay itself has a limited impact on engagement. Increasing salaries by 10% is unlikely to yield the same effect on engagement.


Best practice in EX analysis is to use analytics that predict or qualify how important an experience is to engagement. In surveys the recommended technique to use is relative weights analysis (RWA). If advanced statistics is not your strong point then there's good news. Many EXM vendors integrate predictive analytics as a user friendly tool in their platforms.


For example SAP's Qualtrics EXM platform is one of the fastest growing in the EXM market. I asked Dr Crissa Summer, the Head of Qualtrics Employee Experience Solutions in Australia, how HR could use the Qualtrics platform to analyse low engagement in a leadership group.


Crissa said Qualtrics' EX dashboards have a 'Key Drivers Widget' that performs a relative importance analysis. This widget allows HR to segment the people leader population and predict the experiences most likely to have a positive impact on engagement versus those that are less important (screenshot below):


Once you've identified the experiences which are most important to your leaders, you should then compare these to the employee EX. The objective is to make sense of how the leader EX might be impacting the employee EX.


For example, below is an example from an organisation with both low leader and frontline employee engagement. As some context this organisation was going through a significant transformation where 10% of people would be made redundant. We've compared the top four most important experiences for leaders and employees in a table:


From this comparison, we can begin to develop a hypothesis about what is happening in the organisation:


  • Both leaders and frontline employees are sensitive to the ongoing change (change management being the top driver of engagement in both groups).

  • Leaders are being impacted by corporate pressure to deliver on the main transformation objectives around customer focus and enabling technology. Leaders are also feeling an impact on their wellbeing. Their ability to focus on their people may be limited as a result.

  • Frontline staff need more leadership interaction and communication. Future career and development is understandably a concern given the redundancies.

In this case the recommendation is to support leaders better. Clearly the transformation was taking its toll on their time and energy. Once better supported, these leaders could then pivot their attention towards supporting, communicating and reassuring the frontline through the uncertainty ahead.


Finally by no means are the analyses presented here exhaustive but they do cover the basics techniques to get HR started on a leader EX analysis.


 

Hugh Hawthorne is the founder of PeopleNav. PeopleNav partners with organisations to unlock EXM insights and enable HR to make better data driven decisions through People Analytics.

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