Our global Employee Engagement Survey is driving positive change
The input from our Group-wide Employee Engagement Survey is being used to create action plans to bring about sustainable change throughout our business.
“We created the survey to regularly check where we are in terms of employee engagement and to identify areas we need to focus on,” says Judith Jungmann, Chief Human Resources Officer. “As how our people and teams are feeling naturally affects the performance of our business and our work with sustainability, the action plans and HR tools derived from the survey can really drive positive change throughout our business.”
The Beckers Employee Engagement Survey
We conducted our first global digital survey in all our 18 countries in 2021. Going forward, the survey will be conducted globally every second year with the next one in 2023. “We are extremely proud of our 94 percent employee participation rate in 2021, compared with the 80 percent benchmark,” says Katalin Czebe, People Analytics and Engagement Manager. “This is a great result for our manufacturing company with half our employees not having regular access to IT equipment at work.”
Employee engagement promotes sustainability
Ensuring our employees have an environment and work culture that benefit their development and well-being promotes our ‘People with impact’ sustainability pillar. Employee engagement also helps us to achieve our sustainability objectives by making sure everyone understands how they can contribute – as well as drive action.
Constructive workshops focus on improvements
Manager-led team workshops following each Employee Engagement Survey were made mandatory in 2021. The idea is to summarise the team’s situation today, identify where it wants to be in the future and develop measurable actions with assigned responsibility for how to get there. As of now, over 100 workshops had been conducted around the world, with 71 percent of teams having done a workshop and documented their actions in the system and we know that the last round of workshops have been scheduled. “We provide workshop materials to help the managers and their teams to create an open, constructive and forward-looking discussion around the survey results,” says Katalin. “The workshops enable our teams to develop the solutions to really step-up positive change throughout our organisation.”
2021 survey highlights progress
In the 2021 survey, 82 percent of employees thought that Beckers is making sustainability progress, and 76 percent said they receive sufficient information on sustainability. The survey showed positive improvements in almost all areas particularly in employee feedback, clarity, their understanding of company goals and overall communication. Team efficiency was also reported to have improved following two global trainings on work efficiency. “Areas for improvement identified by the 2021 survey include conflict and stress management and we have developed two new trainings on how to identify and solve conflicts,” says Katalin. “Other areas our teams are focusing on include home working, team efficiency, collaboration, leadership and personal development, and diversity.”
Feedback culture supports employee engagement
Our feedback culture with regular one-on-one Check-In Conversations between every employee and their manager are an essential part of our employee engagement work. “Our Check-In Conversations have created a feedback culture that is characterised by dialogue and helps to resolve and avoid issues and conflicts,” says Katalin. “We debated whether we should go ahead with the Check-Ins during the pandemic, but they proved invaluable in promoting dialogue and understanding during a time of restricted social interaction for many.” In 2020, 94 percent of our employees had at least one Check-In with their manager. Our aim is to ensure that 70 percent of employees have a Check-In every quarter in 2021, although we have actually managed to achieve an average of around 90 percent each quarter.