Engagement surveys for employees at Unilever

He teamed up with his HR Officer and they installed engagement surveys for employees through a simple device.

This way they get ongoing insights as to how their coworkers experience their workdays.

Here’s the first chapter of their journey:
Eugène was on a mission the first weeks in December:

To make his coworkers understand why they wanted to know how people were feeling at work.

And to explain just how easy it was to participate.

At Unilever, all factory workers are invited to press either the Green or Red button as the shift finishes.

Each day they answer the question “How Was Your Day?” (Wie war Dein Tag) on a device at the exit door.

After pressing, the employee engagement result from all colleagues is shown on the device.

The employee mood trend and alerts (a very green or red day for example) are also shown on TV screens.

“We want everyone to see the Celpax results. There’s nothing secret about it”, says Eugène.

 

When elaborating on why Unilever Kleve decided to tap into how their people feel, Eugène states

“A yearly survey is seen as something like ‘This is my time to empty my garbage bin’. After a while, if you actively start engaging with your people and they realize you’re trying to improve, then when you send the survey they don’t fill it in as a garbage bag”.

“I wanted engagement surveys for employees that were an ongoing system like the Celpax. Because I work on a daily basis, not on a two-year basis”, he continues.

Katharina Brinkmann, Unilever’s HR Officer, installed one Celpax next to the time attendance terminal.

She also put an additional device at the exit door where it would be impossible to miss:

“We have to make it a habit to press in order to detect really good or bad days”, she says.

Katharina used the Unilever branding on the device.

She also chose a picture from their production line as the background, as employer branding.

Eugène has the objectives of the employee engagement survey clear.

It’s less about high engagement in itself:

“We want to have an open conversation about how we can make everyone feel better about entering and exiting our workplace.”

“It’s clear that the system is anonymous and I’m happy we don’t see individual scores. The Celpax will be a good indication that the things we do lead to a more satisfied workforce” says Eugène.

“Management has to be able to tune into what’s going on. Instead of getting yearly or half-yearly insights and then you engage, we are now able to continuously try to steer in the right direction.”

“We will be able to see our mood trend and react. The boss shouldn’t come down to the floor only when things are going bad. Nor when it’s too late.”

Katharina and Eugène are open to listening and ready to act on the results from the employee engagement survey:

“You need to do something with the results. If people feel bad and we don’t do anything then they will just ignore the system after a while.”

“We do weekly safety breakfasts where volunteers bring forward feedback and suggestions from their colleagues.”

“Our people then see that we execute a lot of the things they mention. That is one engagement tool, safety. But it only works when you act on the things they bring up”.

“The first days there may have been some question marks from our colleagues”, says Katharina.

“But we made an effort, I was in the meetings myself explaining how easy it is”, Eugène fills in.

“I believe motivated, happy workers are better for company results. So we need to know what’s going on, how people are feeling.”

“If everything goes wrong in the factory it’s not necessarily a bad day. It’s a bad day if no one helps out to solve the problem. When you can say yeah, we had a tough day but my colleagues were there to help me so I had a good day”.

“I’m curious to see how people are influenced by results”, Eugène says with a smile.

“When our factory line runs good, are people more likely to press green? Will we get more red pulses when the production line has problems?”

 

Eugène believes that daily reflection is an important area to start with.

His opinion is that employee engagement has two sides.

”People have to motivate themselves, we just provide the conditions. We are happy to discuss the conditions but motivation needs to come from within”, he continues.

Katharina and Eugène also sat down with Unilever’s workers’ union to talk about employee engagement and their goals.

They play an important part in German companies:

“We explained that we don’t track times, that it’s not a control system, and that it’s up to everyone if they want to do it or not”.

“We explained that we are trying to bring more positive change. That we need to keep doing things to get the whole organization more positive”.

Apart from the employee poll results being shown on the device after pressing red or green, it is also available online where companies can compare their different factories or offices.

The weekly and monthly reports make it easy to share employee engagement news and tendencies with coworkers.

“The first reactions from our people were very good, people see this as something positive,” says Katharina.

“Now we are starting to communicate the results via our tv-screens, to give relevant survey feedback.

“We will use the red and green ratio as a basis for our weekly meetings with shift managers, technicians, etc. We only recently started and among the results we could see that after the Christmas handouts the green went up for example”.

“As managers, we have to be positive”, the Factory Manager continues.

“There’s a lot of talk about customer this and customer that but with this pulse survey we will be able to see how people respond to things.“

“If people are down, it means that we as leaders need to be positive and not just get annoyed when something goes wrong. There’s no success story in management by fear and anger…”

“We will use the Celpax device in our leadership meetings to discuss what we can do to make people stay positive on any given day, and long term”, finishes Eugène.

Interested in simple engagement surveys for employees?

 

Measure workplace morale at your company with a Celpax.

 

 

Hej! I’m Rebecca, co-owner at Celpax. Try our engagement surveys for employees. We want more people to wake up in the morning and feel good about going to work.

I might appear in our chat, or say aloha on twitter.