Employee Engagement

Understanding why people leave your business and having the strategies in place to deal with issues effectively is crucial if you want to retain your best employees.

HR professionals know how vital it is to measure employee engagement and its effect on productivity. This is usually done by an annual employee engagement survey, which although extremely useful for developing actionable plans do have their limitations, which should be recognised.

The data obtained can be limited in value due to the timeliness of the feedback, and only having one occasion a year to garner employee feedback is not usually enough. Using alternative methods to gather this feedback can bring surprising results.

For many of those setting up home in South Africa, Lewis Furniture Retail Stores is typically the first stop they make to buy everything from a new sofa, bed or wardrobe, or even a washing machine or TV. With 350 stores spread across rural and South African urban centres, customers are never far away from one of its outlets.

UPP undertook its first staff survey in July 2011 and has continued every year since. They have been incredibly successful in obtaining high response rates, employing a number of tactics to ensure staff are aware of the survey and the benefits of completing it.