Engagement surveys: why we care

You often don’t stop to think about the small ways your work knowledge bleeds over into your day-to-day life. One of the things that most frequently remind me of this is when I hear the word engagement. Where others think rings and weddings, I think feedback & surveys. While it’s likely not something that anybody’s partner would like to hear (sorry!) it feels appropriate given the topic of employee engagement.

What IS employee engagement?

Like all well studied topics, there are way too many varying definitions with their own nuances and tweaks, but in layman’s terms, I like to think of engagement as the motivating force behind why we show up at work every day (literally and figuratively). As you can imagine, this is the combination of many different factors, like:

• Do you believe in the vision of the company?
• Do you like working with your peers and your leader?
• How’s your work-life balance? Do you have any?
• Are you being fairly compensated?
• Are you being recognized & given feedback for your work?

Everyone is motivated differently by different factors, so when we talk about engagement, we go beyond just the top-line engagement score and dig deep into the comments to understand the context and how each of these factors are impacting employees.

Why does this matter?

We have a dogfooding program where our employees are users of our own product, and leave feedback so we can keep improving.

I think of engagement in the same way, except instead of feedback on our product, it’s feedback on the employee experience of working at TextNow. No matter how smart your Leadership and/or People team might be, their theoretical knowledge is no substitute for feedback from employees, because they're the one living it.

By participating in Engagement surveys, our employees make their voices heard and help to improve the company as a whole. Are there programs that they love? Policies they feel are missing? Leadership behaviors that need to be developed? Engagement surveys are an opportunity to capture all of this and more to help shape what it means to work at TextNow.

We review all feedback shared through our quarterly surveys and while we may not immediately action every single suggestion made, every comment is taken into consideration. No matter how big or small, we're constantly using employee feedback to drive our priorities. Some recent examples of actions based on employee suggestions include:

• Career Leveling Framework
• Bonus Plan + Equity refreshes
• Need for more recognition of teams and individuals
• Long-term vision for the company.

The bottom line is no matter who you are or what your role is, you have the power to shape your work experience. Given we all spend a third of our day at work, don’t you want to make sure it’s time that you enjoy?

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And speaking of work, if you'd like to come help make TextNow even better, take a gander at our careers page.

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