Measuring employee engagement with Qualtrics at Kees Smit

Kees Smit is a Dutch market leader in garden furniture, employing around 500 workers – many of them not digitally connected. To improve the employee experience, Kees Smit decided to simplify its yearly employee survey and make it more attractive. So they called in Flexso to organize a survey with Qualtrics.

Employee engagement as a strategic goal

Although Kees Smit has a large full-time workforce, its business is seasonal, so it also hires extra temporary workers every year. Continuously optimizing the employee experience is a priority for them, so measuring the current engagement makes sense.

"In recent years, we hired an external party to organize employee surveys", says Loes Grobben, HR advisor at Kees Smit. "The yearly surveys were quite long, so we wanted to shift to a more continuous model where we could conduct smaller surveys all year round. We had the HR knowledge to ask the right questions, but we were lacking the technical skills to set up surveys."

About Kees Smit Tuinmeubelen

Kees Smit is a family business that has been operating for three generations. Today, the company is a Dutch market leader in garden furniture, with three branches and a web shop in the Netherlands, alongside web shops in Belgium and Germany.

From insights to actions

"Based on the results, and working with a number of our employees, where necessary, we set out concrete action points to improve the employee experience. We want to let our employees speak for themselves, so we intend to launch smaller surveys with a higher frequency, called 'pulse surveys'."

After choosing Qualtrics as the preferred tool, Kees Smit was referred to Flexso to help implement the survey and train the HR staff. "In retrospect, we're extremely happy that Qualtrics connected us with them", says Loes. “They were involved from the very start. We knew what we wanted to test, but Flexso supported us throughout the technical journey."

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Reaching every employee

Employee experience is, of course, a broad concept. In order to keep the surveys concrete and manageable, the first survey focused on 4 topics:

employee engagement
leadership
ambassadorship
unacceptable behaviour

"We had quite a broad scope for the survey", Loes continues. "As an HR advisor, you really want to know everything. Of course, you need to keep the surveys feasible for employees. So Flexso guided us in setting up an attractive engagement survey. A next step is to set up a text messaging system that will allow employees to quickly take brief surveys. This is how we aim to reach as many employees as possible."

Omnichannel approach

By using an omnichannel approach (informal contact with team managers, emails and internal communication), Kees Smit was able to reach all of their employees. "We had a response rate of about 70%, which we're quite happy with", says Loes. "We expect the text messaging system to further increase that percentage."

At the end of the survey, the results were shared with the managers and employees through internal communication channels. Loes: "We chose to only share the relevant results with each department. The executives were then responsible for sharing the results with their team."

Presenting the data through dashboards

For the first survey, Kees Smit decided to share the results with each department. And for future surveys, they want to visualize the data even more clearly. "Flexso helped us build a dashboard where the data are displayed in a simple format, so for future surveys we will allow managers to log in to the dashboard and only see the results relevant to their department", says Loes.

"We're very happy with Flexso as a partner, and are grateful for their approach and advice on follow-up. Moreover, the survey was set up from scratch in just two weeks. The Flexso staff was always available and helped us tremendously. With the combined HR and technical knowledge, we are now ready to optimize our employee experience continuously with the right tools in place."