Why You Should Do Pulse Surveys In Your Schools
Have you ever wondered how your staff really feel about working at your school?
I mean 100% honest, unfiltered candor.
While school administrators have done a remarkable job over the years in gathering and sharing feedback relative to performance management for staff (e.g., teacher observations), the same can’t be said for gathering and sharing feedback from staff regarding their employer.
Much of school performance, as guided by the government, is grounded in student outcome data - and deservedly so. These data are not only required for annual reporting to the state and federal government, they’re also the lead measures most often used by stakeholders to determine the quality of a school.
When families relocate, one of the first things they check for in purchasing a home is which school district it falls within. In fact, 26% of homebuyers consider the quality of schools when looking for a new home.
It’s surprising, then, that schools really struggle to get a pulse on how their staff are doing and how they feel about their employer. After all, disgruntled staff can damage your employer brand which affects the ability to recruit and retain talented staff - not to mention whether families desire moving into your district.
As a former school psychologist who worked in public schools, I can attest to the challenges administrators experienced in ascertaining who was staying and going from one year to the next. It basically felt like a revolving door - not only with teachers, but with support staff as well (i.e., paraprofessionals, psychologists, teacher aides, cafeteria workers, bus drivers, etc.) - and COVID has only made teacher retention more difficult.
This begs the question: How do schools improve on taking the pulse of their staff to better understand their employer brand?
Wouldn’t it be nice to have an empirically-validated metric that could offer an advance warning if you have several flight risks or low employee morale leading to turnover?
What is Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS)?
This is what led Fred Reichheld to create the first Net Promoter Score metric in 1993. He sought a new way of measuring how well an organization treats the people whose lives it affects, and how well it generates relationships worthy of loyalty.
As it turned out from his research, one question worked best for the most mature, competitive industries: What is the likelihood that you would recommend Company X to a friend or colleague?
While the original focus of this question was to gauge customer sentiment, it later was adapted to the Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) for use with employees to gauge their sentiment in working for their employer:
On a scale from 0-10, how likely are you to recommend working for our organization to your family or friends?
The eNPS answers are then divided into three categories:
0-6: Detractors, employees who are highly dissatisfied with the organization and spread negative word of mouth
7-8: Passives, employees who are neither emotionally invested nor engaged
9-10: Promoters, extremely loyal employees to the organization, and spread a positive word around
The employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) is then calculated as the number of promoters minus the number of detractors divided by the total number of respondents multiplied by 100. Passives are not part of the equations - however your goal should be to nurture them into promoters.
Here are a few tips to consider before using an eNPS survey in your school:
1. The leadership of your schools should know why the survey is being administered to their staff. The methods of following up once the responses are collected should be pre-determined as well. They should also reinforce to staff the importance in offering honest answers and that there are no repercussions for low ratings.
2. The survey should be anonymous. Employees should be guaranteed that their identities are not at stake. As an organization, if you fail to give them this assurance, the results will be diluted. You will not receive unbiased responses from your employees.
3. Participation rates are maximized through mobile phone and tablet accessibility. Folks are most likely to respond when it’s short and can be done on their phone
4. Employee satisfaction is a continuous pursuit. Employee engagement and employee satisfaction are the two pillars of people strategy for any organization and, as such, need to be consistently monitored. Most experts suggest eNPS surveys should be sent out quarterly.
5. Have a follow-up strategy in place - particularly for the responses that fall within the detractor and passive categories. To preserve anonymity, have an automated followup question for scores 0-8 such as: “What is holding you back from referring your family/friends to this organization?”.
Injecting a quarterly eNPS survey into your people strategy for your schools is well worth the time and energy. Consider some of the following benefits:
1. It helps you gauge overall employee loyalty: Employee Net Promoter Score is a quick way to measure employee engagement and the health of the organization
2. Reduce employee attrition: By measuring eNPS and other HR metrics, organizations will be able to prevent high attrition rates and put together a contingency plan.
3. Gives a chance to convert negatives to positives: eNPS survey can help organizations convert their detractors to promoters by collecting accurate feedback and specific areas of improvement for the organization.
4. It is part of an effective teacher retention strategy: Teachers and staff members want to feel valued and heard, and eNPS questions allow your people to share their perspectives and sentiment about the organization.
Above all else, leveraging the power of the eNPS survey is about creating a culture of feedback in your organization where anyone can share or express freely in order to continuously improve the organization.
Effects of Teacher Turnover
Now that we better understand how to implement an eNPS survey and the broad benefits it has to offer, let’s focus on one aspect in particular that is of paramount importance in the current labor market.
Your talent pipeline.
A poor employer brand makes it significantly harder to attract and retain talent. And make no mistake - in schools, your staff are the value-drivers of your school system. They deliver all of the value to your stakeholders.
Let’s face it - teacher turnover is very costly for schools financially. Teacher replacement costs include expenses related to recruitment, hiring, training and professional development. Researchers have estimated these costs to reach as high as 150 percent of the departing teacher’s salary.
Here are some more sobering numbers in the current labor market for education:
90% of teachers hired each year are replacing colleagues who left voluntarily, more than two-thirds of whom quit before retirement
25% of teachers are considering leaving after this school year
Title 1 schools see turnover rates that are nearly 50 percent greater than other schools
One of the biggest issues associated with teacher turnover is the way it leads schools to hire inexperienced, less-effective teachers to fill the void created by recurring vacancies. When qualified educators leave, schools often resort to hiring alternatively certified teachers — those who hold a teaching certificate or license that was earned outside of a traditional college preparation program. It’s often the case that alternatively certified teachers have less preparation and on-the-job support than traditionally certified educators. They’re also 25 percent more likely to leave than a certified teacher.
Additionally, when turnover contributes to teacher shortages schools may also resort to increasing class sizes or cutting some of their offerings, which can also have adverse effects on student learning.
So in addition to the turnover cost of losing the experienced teacher, there are also impounded costs to the quality of instruction being provided to students.
Putting 2 and 2 Together
For these reasons, it has never been more important to have an accurate pulse on your staff with clear feedback on how you can improve as an organization. The stakes are simply too high. Implementing a survey strategy to include eNPS is a very proactive, cost-effective way to continue measuring your staff’s sentiment and devise specific tactics for progress.
And the best way to implement your eNPS is through an all-in-one school culture solution like iAspire which can also handle the follow through of the tactics to improve your school culture and employer brand.