How we monitor and boost Goodlordian engagement and wellbeing by asking the right questions

Understanding how we can help our employees feel engaged with their job and the company is no mean feat, but an important task to undertake, especially with everyone working from home as a company for the first time. We found that the best way to gain this understanding is by asking the right questions in the right way.

Discovering what a good day looks like to employees

Firstly, we realised that it's important for managers to fully understand how a good day at work compares with any other day for the team, so senior staff can recognise how to try to make every day meet their team's expectations of a good day. This includes understanding what tasks made a difference, which add the most value, and how time is used productively; a busy day caused by a poor way of working, for example, will continue week after week and never resolve itself unless actively addressed.

To gain this understanding, we met with as many people as possible across all teams to get an honest impression of how everyone felt. Often this was on a 1:1 basis, away from the team meetings and group sessions, which helped build trust and a good working relationship through a more personal chat.

We asked about:

• Their thoughts on what they thought worked and what didn't work in their department
• What they enjoyed about the role and why
• What they didn’t enjoy and why
• How they were able to interact with the management team and each other
• What development they wanted vs. what they got
• What they thought of the team huddles, the weekly team meeting, and morning check ins

Once we had gathered this information, we used it to decide on the actions that we needed to take, including:

• Encouraging discussion around performance statistics and how these were communicated
• Tweaking how we recognise team-based anniversaries, birthdays, and other well done messages in meetings, to boost motivation
• Introducing training on how to deliver feedback, including creating a development plan with resources and web links to use when needed
• Going over Officevibe results and feedback with the team every week - without fail

Taking on board anonymous feedback through Officevibe

Having those personal conversations is one way to gain feedback to see where to improve. Another way is by gathering anonymous feedback, digitally and we use Officevibe to send out regular surveys, continuously analysing the feedback we receive.

Although this is a great tool, we realised that it wasn't being used to its full potential, as many employees thought that if they're generally happy, they didn't need to complete it or some didn't take the time to add additional comments.

To improve engagement with the questions, we communicated more to Goodlordians on why we use tools like Officevibe, why it’s anonymous, and the mutual benefit for all concerned, highlighting actions that we'd taken in the past based on feedback provided. For example, based on the "Happiness", "Health" and "Personal Growth" sections, we improved breakout sessions to encourage team building and development plus suggested structured Open University courses, guided meditation Yoga and so on.

These actions helped encourage Goodlordians to engage with the questions and comment when the survey was distributed. We could then share the increase in positive comments - which in itself helped to boost positivity across the teams - and ensure we had plenty of feedback on what we could improve upon going forwards.

Keeping employees engaged will always be an ongoing process with regular changes to our approach, but with this structure in place, we're in a good position to take the right decisions for all Goodlordians across all teams.

Want to join the Goodlord team? Check out our current vacancies.