For those who are unfamiliar with so-called “poll surveys”, a brief explanation may be helpful. Poll surveys (also commonly referred to as pulse surveys) emerged as a response to traditional annual or biannual employee surveys. One of the main reasons is that survey responses are often heavily influenced by the context at the time they are collected. For example, if an organization is going through a cost-cutting exercise, employees are likely to respond less positively. If you only measure employee sentiment once every two years, it becomes difficult to account for these contextual effects.

Poll surveys therefore became an alternative that allows organizations to measure more frequently, but with fewer questions. In many cases, the questionnaire is limited to a maximum of ten questions. This provides a clearer view of trends and developments within the organization over time. Many organizations conduct these surveys on a monthly or even weekly basis. However, Mick and the Arvesta team initially chose to measure employee engagement every six months, and they had a very good reason for doing so.

Together with his colleagues, Mick wanted to emphasize the actions that followed the survey. Organizations can measure as much as they want, but if employees feel that nothing is done with the results, their enthusiasm will quickly decline. The same is true for survey participation rates.

At Arvesta, this was certainly not the case. They observed a clear increase in the number of teams that discussed the survey results and actively used them to drive improvements. This was not merely based on feedback received by the People Analytics team. The final question in every poll survey was: “To what extent were these results discussed within your team?” This was a clever way to measure the impact of the survey itself. In other words, action proved to be more important than frequency—a lesson that can be applied to all types of employee surveys.

Creating a strong survey is important, but it is equally important to ensure that enough employees actually complete it. Based on our experience, many organizations underestimate this aspect. Mick and the project team, however, developed a comprehensive communication plan to engage and encourage as many employees as possible to participate.

Communication should always be tailored to the target audience. For example, reaching blue-collar employees through email is often ineffective. In such cases, it is usually better to engage with employees on-site and provide support where needed during the survey process. In general, there are three important phases of communication: before the survey, during the survey, and after the survey. Only by investing in all three phases can you effectively engage employees and maximize response rates. In short, communication is a crucial driver of both participation and engagement.

Mick’s case highlighted another challenge that many organizations encounter when getting started with people analytics: making choices. Throughout his presentation, it became clear that Arvesta deliberately chose to build step by step on solid foundations rather than trying to fix everything at once.

For example, several aspects of their engagement analysis are still tracked and monitored manually. They also use Excel for reporting rather than a sophisticated analytics platform. At first glance, this may not seem particularly ambitious, but within Arvesta it is a conscious and well-considered choice.

Their people analytics roadmap outlines a clear vision for how the organization intends to increase its maturity in the field of HR data. However, the objective is not to grow quickly, but to grow sustainably. While they plan to evolve towards a digital platform where all results can be shared and accessed centrally, they have consciously chosen not to take that step just yet.

Just as careful thought was given to the communication surrounding the poll survey, Mick and his colleagues also put considerable effort into the way the results were reported. Mick shared an example from a previous report that contained a wealth of valuable information, but ultimately included too much detail, causing the core message to get lost.

A tailored reporting approach was therefore developed for the different internal target audiences. This included a concise, high-level report for senior management, as well as an equally concise report for the broader employee population with a clear connection to their day-to-day work reality. In addition, a dedicated report was created for managers and team leaders, providing them with more detailed insights into their own teams.

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