(Editor’s Note: Today’s post is brought to you by our friends at SilkRoad, whose passion is creating a world-class employee experience. I just returned from their annual users’ conference – three days of networking, education and fun. I wrote a post about their great event over on the SilkRoad blog. Hope you’ll check it out here!)

According to SilkRoad’s TalentTalk Research Program, the most popular way companies measure employee engagement is via their annual employee survey (59%). Since employee surveys should never be done haphazardly, this puts the development, implementation and communication of an employee survey front and center.

Employee opinion surveys are used for a variety of reasons. I’ve always looked at them as a way to converse with employees about the workplace. They provide a tremendous amount of data. But I believe it’s short-sighted to view them as a report card about how things are going. Because while there’s a lot of data that is gleaned from surveys, it’s never the whole story.

Surveys offer the ability to receive feedback at every level:

Organizationally, a survey can identify company strengths and weaknesses. It can confirm if actions align with corporate mission and values.

Departmentally, employees can share their views on job responsibilities, department safety, work environment, and relationship with their manager.

Individually, the survey can offer feedback about company benefits, career development, and compensation.

Before you start designing your survey, take the time to get management and employees comfortable with the process. One thing you will want to do is bring in a third party to administer the survey. It’s not because the company isn’t capable of conducting a survey. But creating an atmosphere of confidentiality and anonymity is important. If employees feel their comments aren’t being taken in the spirit of improving the workplace, they won’t share information freely. And managers need to understand this isn’t some subversive move to fire them.

The first rule in designing an employee survey is don’t ask anything you’re not prepared to change. Or at least consider changing. There’s nothing worse than asking someone for their opinion then ignoring it. Ultimately, it hurts the credibility of the survey and employees won’t want to participate.

Some other items to consider when designing your employee survey:

Length – There’s a delicate balance between “just right” and “too much”. The company is looking for valuable information. Keep the length of the survey manageable. After designing the survey, have a few coworkers take it and time themselves – for practice only – so you can communicate how long it will take to complete the survey.

Comments – Allow employees to include comments. This is tremendously rich information. If you use a third party to administer the survey, they should be able to scrub any identifiers out of the comments so they remain truly anonymous.

Questions/Statements – Be careful not to create any biased or leading questions.

Benchmarking – Create a few questions that you will use in future surveys to benchmark trends in the workforce. Also include an “intent to stay” question for use as a retention score.

After the survey has been conducted and the reporting complete, then begins the most important part of the process – communicating the survey results. This is an absolute must. Communicating results must be done in a timely manner to the entire workforce. There are many ways to communicate results – all employee meetings, department meetings, or a combination of both.

All employee meetings are an efficient way to communicate results. Some companies already have a regular all staff meeting or town hall type gathering in place. The downside can be trying to create some dialogue if it’s a large meeting. This can be addressed a couple of ways:

One option is to give each employee an index card. Have them write any questions or comments they may have on it (don’t require them to include their name). Someone can collect the cards to ask the questions. Similar to an interview format.

Another option is to allow employees to work in groups to develop questions. They can identify a spokesperson in their group to ask the question. It still allows for anonymity because the table conversation stays amongst the employees. And it’s unknown how much the spokesperson was involved in the discussion.

Department meetings are great from a scheduling standpoint as well. Most departments have a regularly scheduled meeting. It’s also a smaller gathering and allows for a different level of conversation. This can be a challenging meeting for managers. I’ve often seen managers in a panic that employees are going to gang up on them during a department meeting. Preparing managers for open dialogue and constructive feedback is important to the success of this meeting.

I’ve always found a combination of the two to be the best approach. Each has their own agenda of items to discuss. The conversation gets more detailed and less formal as it moves from a large all employee meeting to the smaller department meeting. Ultimately leading to individual conversations between managers and employees. That’s where the opportunity to create engagement occurs.

Employee opinion surveys are a valuable way to take a pulse on the workforce. And they provide great data. But it’s the meetings and conversations after the survey that provide the foundation for improving the workplace and the essentials of employee engagement.

If you want to see more of SilkRoad’s latest employee engagement study, check out this infographic they created using the report data. You can also check out their website, follow them on Twitter and subscribe to their YouTube channel.

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I stumbled across this article in The Atlantic talking about the number of older workers surpassing younger workers for the first time. It’s really not a surprise. Many baby boomers are having to postpone retirement because they’re still feeling the impact of the Great Recession. While the economy is getting better, let’s not kid ourselves…for many, there’s still a lot of catching up to do.

I’m really surprised that business isn’t talking about this a bit more.

We need young professionals in the workforce. Not just for their fresh thinking and ability to move up the corporate ladder. The economy needs people to do all the stuff that happens when we’re young: buy or rent places to live, decorate homes, take vacations, fall in love, marry or move in with someone. If young professionals are unemployed or underemployed, those options are limited.

Meanwhile, organizations must recognize that older workers will retire someday. Maybe not next week or next month. Maybe not even next year. But at some point, they will retire and companies should be ready. Plans need to be in place to capture the knowledge of this soon-to-be retiree. Companies should identify the new keepers of historical knowledge and create transition plans for the transfer of those stories, antidotes and information that is essential to remember.

Conversations about our workforce shouldn’t focus on debating who’s better – older or younger workers. Every person regardless of age brings their talents to the company.

That’s why you’re hiring them. What’s important to recognize is if your company has a lot of older workers, are you prepared for the wave of them retiring? Do you know where to find the talent to replace them? And, is there a plan in place to get them the knowledge they will need to succeed?

And what happens if the person thinking about retiring is a senior level executive?

Think about how long it takes to become a fully functioning productive employee in your company. I know organizations that say it can take as much as a year to really be exceptionally productive. That means an organization needs to hire someone one year before a person retires. Which begs the question – are employees giving you a year’s notice they are going to retire? Hmmm…probably not.

Businesses need to regularly have this conversation and put measures in place to deal with it. Or they run the risk of being desperately out of talent when they need it the most.

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Want a competitive edge? The key is all about the way a company manages change, according to i4cp’s report “Building a Change-Ready Organization: Critical Human Capital Issues 2013”. You can download a copy of the full report here.

Change is a critical differentiator in today’s business world. Being able to recognize the need for change and incorporate necessary changes helps both individuals and organizations stay on top of their game. In the i4cp report, they mention two competencies for managing change effectively:

Preparedness is being able to anticipate and take advantage of change. Many people are able to see change coming. It’s about leveraging the opportunity.

Agility is defined as the ability to move quickly and decisively.

If change were a formula, it would look something like this:

Once a company knows that change is necessary, it comes down to how they spend their time. Does it wait for change to arrive and gripe the entire time about how it’s going to wreck their business? Or is the time spent putting a plan in place to potentially mitigate any losses and possibly benefit from the change? Because if your competitive set is busy grousing then it only makes good business sense to set yourself apart by embracing the change.

One way a company can really benefit is when their employees are capable of being agile in preparing for change. That means having a well-defined and executed strategy where your employees are concerned. The i4cp report shares several indicators for evaluating your talent management strategy. Here are a couple things that caught my eye:

• Leadership development plays a huge role in high-performing workplaces, especially when management is held accountable for their performance.
• Goal setting and performance management has a clear purpose and is connected to organizational objectives.

It comes down to hiring the right people and giving them the tools to succeed. This includes communicating expectations, training where appropriate and developing individuals for future needs.

Want a competitive edge? Develop the best darn group of employees you can. They’ll make sure managing change is a no-brainer.

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(Editor’s Note: Today’s post is brought to you by Allied Van Lines®, a leader in the moving and storage industry with more than 75 years of experience. For a second year, they are championing a research project, Allied HRIQ, aimed to provide business professionals with data on current workforce trends. I’m honored to be working with Allied again and hope you find the information interesting.)

A few months ago, Yahoo! President and CEO Marissa Mayer banned telecommuting. The response uproar backlash was swift. Experts from everywhere said telecommuting is essential to employee satisfaction and engagement. Some said this was the first sign of the apocalypse. All right – you caught me. No one really said that … but you would have thought the world was coming to an end given all the media attention.

Let me toss an idea out there. Maybe telecommuting isn’t the utopia we think it is. Or that it’s been hyped up to be.

By definition, telecommuting is when employees do not travel to a central place of work. Telecommuting is also referred to as telework or remote work. Typically when a person telecommutes, they’re working from home. So chances are, they have a home office. Although there are some telecommuters who work from airports and coffee shops.

This is different than flexible work (aka flextime). Flexible work is when employees have the ability to adjust their work hours. There might be some core hours that everyone is required to be in the office. That’s probably driven by operational needs. But there are hours that employees can “flex” to accommodate traffic, parenting responsibilities, caregiving duties, etc.

I must admit there have been times when I’ve used the terms telecommuting, telework, flexwork, etc. interchangeably. But the terms are very different and this year’s Allied HRIQ research shares some interesting findings where recruiting, telecommuting, and flexible work are concerned.

Click to Enlarge

In looking at the chart above it will be no surprise that corporate culture, management and leadership, and professional development were high on the list. Healthcare was rated number one – which I find surprising. Companies feel they have more strength in their healthcare package than with the quality of senior leadership.

But the thing that caught my eye was telecommuting rated pretty low on the list. Given the reaction to the Mayer decision, I expected telecommuting to be higher. Interesting note: flexible working arrangements was several places above telecommuting.

Then it occurred to me. Telecommuting is about working from home. As someone who currently works from home, I’ll confess – it can be tough. Work is always staring you in the face. You have to learn how to deal with it. If employees aren’t able to figure out how to create balance when they live and work in the same place, it can be a detriment to productivity and employee morale.

On the other hand, it’s impossible to shut off our personal lives when we arrive at work. Employees do have outside commitments and obligations. Having flexible work arrangements give employees the ability to deal with all the other things in their lives and still get their work done in an office environment. And they don’t necessarily need a home office. So work doesn’t need to stare them in the face every evening.

I’m certainly not saying that companies with telecommuting programs should toss them out the window. Allied HRIQ’s research reminded me that telecommuting isn’t necessarily an employee engagement Shangri-La. Just because it works for one company or one individual doesn’t mean it will work for everyone. Some organizations may find other options, like flexible work, bring better results and employees like it more.

My takeaway from Allied’s data is the importance of feedback.

• Ask new hires what it was about the company that sold them.
• Find out from current employees what keeps them coming to work every day.
• Include a question in exit interviews about which benefits and programs the employee enjoyed.

Creating a feedback mechanism will allow companies to determine which programs work best for their culture and their employees.

There’s lots more interesting reading in the Allied HRIQ research. I encourage you to check it out by visiting their website, connecting with their LinkedIn group, or following them on Twitter. Also, be on the lookout for more Allied HRIQ insights from my HR blogger compadres Steve Boese, Kris Dunn and Trish McFarlane.

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Blogs were started back in the 1990s. At that time, they were mostly the work of a single individual about a single subject. Today, it’s estimated there are about 130 million blogs in existence covering more subjects that we can even begin to imagine. For that reason, it can seem like a Herculean task to start a blog. Which brings us to this reader’s question.

Hi Sharlyn. I’m an HR pro with 10 years’ experience and my PHR. I have a passion for all things human resources. Since being downsized last year and feeling out of the loop, I started using Twitter.

I’m thinking of starting a blog and really have no idea where to begin. My dream would be to move into consulting but I have to be realistic and find a job. I’m hoping to start something that could eventually get me going in the consulting direction. I really love your stuff. Would you mind a little advice for a social newbie?

It’s hard to believe I’ve been blogging for five years now. At the time I decided to start blogging, I knew nothing about it. So I read three books – Andy Wibbles’ book “Blog Wild!”, Darren Rowse’s “Problogger” and a book on WordPress design. Once I started blogging, I reached out to other bloggers and asked questions. Kris Dunn at the The HR Capitalist and Laurie Ruettimann at The Cynical Girl were very gracious and helpful as I started blogging.

Looking back on my experience, there are 5 things I would recommend to others who are considering blogging.

1. Decide why you want to blog. It might be to make money. Or get a job. Or find clients for your consulting business. Before you do anything…decide why you’re doing it. That answer will drive other decisions you need to make about platform, hosting, naming, marketing, etc.
2. Never say never. Like many things, the reasons you blog will change. And that’s okay. I’ve seen many bloggers start because they want to share their expertise and later decide they want to make money. There’s no reason you can’t do both. Be open to opportunities as they arise.
3. Think about the platform. I made the decision to blog on a self-hosted WordPress site and it has worked well for me. Others swear by Tumblr or Blogger. Do your homework when it comes to what platform you want to blog on. Because from what I hear, it’s a real pain to change platforms or hosting.
4. Choose your blog’s name carefully. Regardless of the reason you’re blogging, you will want need to market your blog. So you have to create a name that helps you accomplish your blogging goals (see #1). It can be very challenging to change the blog’s name and rebrand – no different than when companies do it.
5. Consider how much time you want to dedicate. Blogging takes work. Sometimes a lot of work. When I started, I published once a week. Only when I was comfortable did I up it to twice a week, and so forth. Also, consider your readers. Put yourself into the shoes of your audience. How many times is good to post? How long should a post be? If you’re trying to get people to read your blog, these are things to consider.

All of these questions aren’t designed to scare anyone away. Au contraire – it’s to set you up for success. Taking the time on the front end will hopefully eliminate a few frustrations and the possibility of abandoning the blog.

And, if you’re wondering why the list has very little about writing, it’s because we all have something to say. We all have a passion that we can share. That part you’ve already taken care of.

Got a question or suggestion about blogging? Leave it in the comments.

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I’ve written before about working with people you don’t like. But what happens if you’re the manager and your employees don’t get along. That’s the conundrum this manager faces.

I’ve been the manager at a restaurant and bar for about 5 years. The place used to have a “family” feel when it came to the employees – everyone took care of each other. Recently, some people left to go get their PHDs and the restaurant hired 4 new employees.

One of the newest employees is being singled out and the other bartenders and servers refuse to help her. This isn’t because of lack of effort on her part. Although she has made comments that she’s not here to make friends – she’s here to do a job.

That being said, we recently had one of the busiest nights ever. The other employees refused to help her and left her without doing their duties, stocking, cleaning, rolling silverware, etc. I’m so very frustrated at everyone refusing to help each other out. They are more concerned about their tips than they are in doing their job. HELP!

I know what it’s like to be around people who don’t get along. It’s not fun and can lead to creating a negative place not only for employees but customers. And sometimes, as a manager, you’re not sure whether you should get involved. Seriously, these are grown adults. In these situations, I’m reminded about a couple of things that help me decide the best approach.

At some point, you will work with someone you don’t like. Pure and simple. Maybe it’s just a little dislike or maybe you intensely can’t stand them. Possibly you were BFFs and became bitter enemies. Regardless of the reason, we all have to learn how to have a working relationship with people we don’t care for.

Even though you don’t like one (or all) of your co-workers, you still have to do your job. Because this is work and we were hired to get certain things done. Disliking someone is not a legitimate reason for not getting your work done. Unless of course, your dislike is because of their illegal, immoral or unethical behavior. If that’s the case, then you need to speak with someone about the illegal, immoral or unethical activity.

To the girl being singled out – you are absolutely right. You’re there to do a job. But if your demeanor creates a negative work environment, then you’re really not doing your job. Part of our role as employees is to enhance the workplace not take away from it.

To the other employees – If you can’t get past your dislike of someone, it might be time to face some realities. For example, take the situation above. Even if the singled out employee is acting like a jerk, everyone else isn’t getting their work done. Put yourself in your manager’s shoes. Who would you side with? The singled out employee who appears to be getting their work done and, to the best of our knowledge, doesn’t have any customer complaints OR the other employees who aren’t getting their work done and are refusing to help a co-worker.

To the manager – If employees are letting their feelings for one another impact their work, then management needs to address the issue. Why? Because it’s impacting the work. But be prepared to possibly hear that the singled out employee has done something to create the situation. Or that the group says the singled out employees isn’t a team player because the rest of them get along.

In my personal experience, it’s best to resolve these conflicts early. Find time to talk with the people involved. Ask the question, “How can we move past this?” Because “having a good working relationship is important”.

What do you think? Is there anything else this manager can do?

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(Editor’s Note: Today’s post is brought to you by The Workforce Institute at Kronos, a think tank that helps organizations drive performance by addressing human capital management issues that affect employees. Next Thursday, May 16at 12noon ET, I’ll be co-hosting a TweetChat with the Institute on the Affordable Care Act. Hope you can join us!)

Remember the story of Sisyphus? He was the mythological Greek King who was punished for being untrustworthy by having to push a stone up a hill forever. I like to think of this myth as a story about Karma. Unbecoming behavior eventually catches up.

It might not be full blown trickery but, let’s face it, we’re lying to ourselves when we cut corners. We know we should upgrade our systems but we don’t. Or we should automate a process and we delay it. Eventually our business will pay the price as our friends from Kronos point out in this week’s cartoon.

The marketplace is changing. Companies are hiring. The Dow Jones hit 15,000 – an all-time high. It’s time to ask ourselves “What have we been putting off?” The last thing a company wants right now is to be stuck pushing a boulder of a project uphill. And believe me – it will seem like an eternity.

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