In conversation with Marlies Oostendorp, Marketing, Communications & HR Manager at Svea Finans.
The challenge
For a number of years, Svea Finans has been conducting an annual Employee happiness survey (Employee happiness survey) to examine the engagement and satisfaction of its employees. Svea considers this an important issue for the organization. “After all, you want to know what’s going on with the employees. When you ask them directly, sometimes you get just a little less back than through an anonymous survey,” Marlies said. Svea greatly values the input its employees give, and tries to act on it (whenever possible).
The first time Svea wanted to conduct an Employee happiness survey, it did so in collaboration with an hr agency. This agency helped Svea with the questionnaire and analyzing the results. At the time, the Employee happiness survey was sent out via Google Forms. Svea then continued to pick it up itself annually.
For example, from an earlier Employee happiness survey, it emerged that employees would like to exchange more feedback with each other. The actions Svea has taken for this include facilitating feedback training, but it was also the impetus for starting Learned. In fact, the platform allows employees to exchange feedback. Also, in previous Employee happiness surveys, Svea ran into the challenge that, by working through Google Forms, employees could not see their own results after completing the questionnaire. Learned, on the other hand, provides a complete overview of all actions now and in the past.
The solution
When Marlies heard that Learned was also going to launch an Engagement tool, she was immediately excited. Researching employee engagement is high on the agenda at Svea, and how great is it if this can be done within the same tool in which the hr interviews take place? In addition, it was a plus that employees could continue to see their own survey results.
The result
At the time of the interview, Svea had just begun analyzing the results and creating the action plan. Marlies expressed curiosity about how the Learned Engagement model could contribute to Svea’s action plan. The Learned Engagement model is Learned’s science-based research that not only substantiates what themes influence employee engagement. It also provides concrete and substantiated action items for each theme to increase theme scores.
One important result that Marlies could already share with us from the 2023 Employee happiness survey is that employees rate Svea as an employer with an average of 8.9. Svea is extremely proud of this great score, although she sees this good result coming back more often. As a result, this high standard has become the norm. Nonetheless, points have also emerged where employees feel there is some room for improvement, such as cooperation within teams. Marlies indicates: “This is an issue that is in play that we as an organization need to address.” Indirectly, this affects employee satisfaction and thus, in the long run, perhaps, turnover. “Fortunately, turnover at Svea is low, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that it is also a focus here,” Marlies says. This is also one of the themes reflected in the Learned Engagement model that Svea can use in support.
In addition, Marlies believes it is important to be able to easily feed the results and plan of action back to the employees so they feel heard and valued. By surveying employee engagement and satisfaction through surveys in Learned, Marlies has quick access to the report and can then easily share it with employees. Above all, Svea can easily continue to monitor what is going on within the organization.
To conclude
To conclude the conversation, we asked Marlies what she thinks is the big advantage of working with Learned. To this Marlies answered concisely, “With Learned, Svea can now easily manage and monitor employee engagement as well as hr interviews in one tool.” The convenience of the tool, in which both employee development and organizational development can be queried, is a major perk for Svea!
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Are you curious what services Svea Finans offers? Then quickly click through to her website.
