Post office has reinvented the way it measures employee engagement to deal with the sharp shifts of change during the Covid-19 (Coronavirus) pandemic.
In March 2020, when all office-based employees were told to work from home due to the health risks of the pandemic, Post Office introduced pulse surveys to understand how engaged its employees were.
Emma Springham, chief marketing officer at Post Office, said: "The nature of employee engagement changed the minute everyone began working from home. We’re used to agile working, but when it involves everyone in our offices all of the time, we needed to think on our feet."
Post Office used employee engagement platform Qualtrics to measure employee engagement to the best of its ability, and sent out a pulse survey once every two weeks, which employees can access through an internal intranet.
With over 5,000 employees, the organisation had to work towards setting up an effective survey that gave all employees an opportunity to voice their thoughts, regardless of whether they were working from home or not.
Springham says: "Most people’s primary concerns aren’t quantifiable. Their issues included, 'how do I deliver against this target when I’ve got two kids who aren’t at school and need constant help?' or 'lots of my normal customers are vulnerable and isolated and I want to help them out while also running a branch'."
Post Office used the Qualtrics platform to ask employees how they are feeling, how they feel the business is handling change during the pandemic, how the business can help them, and if there is enough communication within the business, with enough space for employees to leave more comments if they chose to do so. Using these questions consistently over a five-month period enabled the management board to have a 360-degree view of how employees were feeling.
"We had to get specific with our listening. The result is that the business has found many more heroes than it had before. We’ve discovered a huge amount and there’s a greater focus than ever on the individual, rather than just the data," Springham says. "We measure employee engagement regularly and use the best modelling. It’s still an ongoing situation so we don’t know exactly how things will end up, but I think that we’ll see a much greater emphasis on community, collaboration and having basic wellbeing needs to be met within engagement metrics."
Based on these metrics, the employer was able to introduce new employee initiatives, such as virtual bingo, discos, and set up an LGBTQ+ network called Prism, to give employees an opportunity to communicate and engage with one another.
Springham says: "Ultimately, we need to keep doing the right thing at the right time. It’s not always easy to know what that is, but employee engagement measurement tools have given us the insight we need to make the best choices."