“No man needs a vacation so much as the man who has just had one.”
– Elbert Hubbard
Employees hate returning to work after a long break, especially after the holiday season. And how do they react? Remember how Andy describes stress in an episode of The Office? He likens it to the musical Footloose, explaining “Stress is like the uptight mayor of a town who’s saying, ‘Hey, we’re uptight. You can’t dance.'” He then boogies down to loosen up, trashing the place like a party gone wrong.
On screen, that’s hilarious. In reality, not so much. Imagine your employees with post-holiday blues going wild and knocking things over. Not great.
In reality, though, employees do often return from holidays needing a boost in morale and motivation. In an APA poll, 89% of American adults said they were stressed last holiday season due to financial and familial reasons.
How can you turn that around? By creating an employee-first culture. And how do you do that? By conducting post-holiday survey analysis and taking actions based on survey results. It helps you improve the employee experience by addressing their concerns, leading to boosted employee engagement and retention.
Read on to discover why assessing employee feedback after holidays is crucial, how to do that effectively, the tools to use, and the benefits of post-holiday surveys.
Why post-holiday survey analysis matters
Why are post-holiday employee surveys essential? For obvious reasons, they gauge stress levels, resolve issues, give employees job satisfaction, and improve morale. Remember the outcome: “Happy employees do better jobs.”
Let’s see why employees feel disengaged after holidays and how post-holiday feedback can help:
Understanding employee sentiment after the holidays
Although temporary, many employees feel gloomy, stressed, and tired right after the holiday season. It’s because they undergo a lot during the holidays:
- Workloads often peak during the holidays, resulting in long work hours with tight deadlines.
- Taking a vacation from work is still work, with all the planning for festivities, gatherings, and trips
- Holiday activities, such as social events, family gatherings, excursions, shopping, etc., disrupt people’s routines and can drain them.
- Buying gifts, traveling, and hosting parties can put a financial strain on those with tight budgets
Not surprisingly, 53% of employees feel edgier than usual, while 41% report a minor to substantial productivity decline even this year, according to a Monster work-life balance survey.
The holiday busyness leaves employees exhausted. And post-holidays, the contrast between holiday excitement and returning to monotony also gets on their nerves, making them wish they’d had more days off. Readjusting to work seems like a Sisyphean task, resulting in a lack of focus and motivation.
In an APA interview, work-life balance experts suggested that people should prefer relaxation to a packed itinerary and compulsive socializing to truly de-stress and rejuvenate.
Relating post-holiday feedback to employee morale and retention
Holiday season burnout is real. And it causes high turnover. What can you do about it? Well, you must start planning and implementing stress-busting strategies pre-holidays and continue through the new year’s first quarter. These strategies include the following initiatives:
- During holidays: Flexible holiday work schedules with realistic deadlines, sufficient time off to rest, well-being support and resources, effective communication, etc.
- After holidays: Team-building opportunities, post-holiday survey analysis, growth opportunities, effort appreciation, back-to-work wellness initiatives, etc.
Among these initiatives, gathering employee feedback after holidays is one of the best ways to pulse employees’ post-holiday sentiment by analyzing their stress levels and job satisfaction, metrics that determine morale and retention rates.
Actively seeking feedback makes employees feel appreciated, helps address workplace challenges, and creates a more positive work environment. It leads to improved productivity, well-being, and job satisfaction, factors directly related to better retention. For instance, employees who feel recognized are 6x more likely to retain their jobs.
Benefits of post-holiday survey analysis for businesses
Analyzing employee satisfaction and stress levels post-vacations and initiating corrective actions offers several benefits, including more engaged employees with improved productivity. For instance, according to Gallup research, employees with higher engagement levels exhibit 18% higher productivity than disengaged employees.
Let’s see how you can materialize these benefits at your workplace:
1. Improving employee experience
Giving feedback enables employees to let off pent-up emotions and promotes a culture of open communication. Half of their stress vanishes just by communicating their difficulties to HR.
For instance, employees can open up about what’s bugging them most, including excessive holiday workloads, lack of managerial support, unrealistic deadlines, inadequate resources, workplace conflicts, communication hassles, work-life imbalance, financial pressures, and back-to-work challenges.
Additionally, these surveys help the HR team enhance employee experience by identifying and addressing specific improvement areas. For example, asking questions about communication, collaboration, and resource use can uncover hidden frustrations and unmet needs that negatively impact employee morale.
2. Enhancing retention through targeted insights
Employee engagement matters. It has a significant impact on retention rates. For instance, a survey found that a lack of a two-way channel between management and employees decreased retention rates by 16%. Conversely, engaged employees exhibit better performance, less burnout, and longer retention.
Gathering feedback and acting on targeted insights from employee surveys lets you connect with employees deeply and shows your commitment to their well-being. This builds trust among employees, makes them more loyal, and reduces post-vacation turnovers.
It’s because employees care more about their work impact, workplace culture, flexible time off policies, work-life balance, and team collaboration than just financial rewards. Investing in employee satisfaction invariably leads to better employee retention and your company’s growth.
3. Facilitating effective future holiday planning
For the reasons discussed, stress is at its peak among employees before and during the holiday season. In addition, rigid holiday schedules and inadequate time off work worsen stress and lead to burnout, ultimately resulting in low spirits and higher turnover.
Conducting pre- and post-vacation surveys helps you gauge employees’ holiday stress and gives valuable insights into their attitudes toward the holiday season schedule.
This can help you make effective data-driven decisions about planning holiday work schedules for the subsequent years.
Key metrics to track in post-holiday surveys
Conducting surveys without pre-defined metrics is like driving a car without a steering wheel. With metrics, you can gain meaningful insights into employee sentiment and define SMART goals to improve employee experience.
For example, your goal could be to increase engagement by 25% within a month post the holiday season to improve morale and retention. To achieve that, you’ll need quantifiable data to start with.
Employee satisfaction levels
Employee satisfaction depends on several factors. And higher satisfaction translates to better engagement. That’s why measuring satisfaction levels, especially pre- and post-holidays, is crucial. It lets you understand what went wrong during the holidays and take corrective actions.
Here’s a list of significant satisfaction metrics you can use in your post-vacation survey analysis:
- ESAT (Employee Satisfaction): It measures employees’ overall job and company satisfaction. It gauges employee happiness with remuneration, benefits, work culture, leadership, work-life balance, etc.
- eNPS (employee Net Promoter Score): It measures how likely employees are to recommend their organization as good.
- Turnover Rate: Higher satisfaction means less turnover. Since replacing an employee costs an organization 1.5 to 2 times their annual salary, this is a crucial metric to gauge and improve satisfaction.
- Absenteeism Rate: High absenteeism indicates lower job satisfaction and poor well-being. It also increases others’ workloads, spreading stress and dissatisfaction to the entire team.
Work-life balance insights
Employees regard work-life balance as highly as compensation. It weighs heavily on their work attitudes, so much so that 60% consider their personal life more significant than work, according to the Randstad Workmonitor 2024.
However, measuring work-life balance requires a more nuanced approach with several indicators. One measure is how employees distribute time among work, family/friends, and themselves during the holidays when time is less and there is much to do.
Another way is to analyze employees’ physical and mental well-being, as most people feel highly anxious and eat the most calories during the holidays.
Steps for effective post-holiday survey analysis
Conducting post-holiday surveys takes time. Analyzing the responses to derive actionable insights takes more time. Here’s how you can accelerate the process of assessing employee feedback after holidays:
1. Choose the right survey questions
The first step is to create a survey with a comprehensive set of questions. When choosing survey questions, consider the positive and negative impact of holidays on employee stress and satisfaction levels.
Form a mix of clear and concise questions, including quantitative (e.g., demographics, rating, ranking, MCQs, etc.) and qualitative (e.g., open-ended, specific feedback, suggestions) question types.
Check out the following sample questions that you can include in your post-holiday surveys:
Employee Satisfaction
- Rate your overall satisfaction with the company’s holiday schedule and policies. (Satisfaction Scale)
- How often did you feel overwhelmed with work during the holidays? (Frequency Scale)
- How often did you work overtime during the holiday season? (Frequency Scale)
- Rank the following factors in order of importance to your overall job satisfaction: Work-life balance, Compensation, Recognition, Career development opportunities, Workplace culture. (Ranking)
- What did you feel was most challenging during the holidays? (Open-ended)
- What are your thoughts on the company’s communication regarding holiday schedules and deadlines? (Open-ended)
Work-Life Balance
- On a scale of 0 to 5, how satisfied were you with your work-life balance during the holidays? (Satisfaction Scale)
- Rank the following factors in terms of their impact on your stress levels during the holidays: Workload, Communication, Team Support, Personal commitments. (Ranking)
- What could the company do to better support your work-life balance during the holidays? (Open-ended)
While it seems like it could take ages, here’s good news. Employee experience (EX) platforms like SogoEX offer ready-to-use post-holiday survey templates to listen to employees. They also provide end-to-end EX management for the entire employment cycle, right from hiring to exit interviews.
2. Leverage analytics tools for survey data
The next step is to analyze employee responses to extract insights regarding their post-holiday blues and engagement levels. Again, manually assessing each response is time-consuming, error-prone, and simply not feasible for hundreds of employees.
Instead, you can use AI-powered HR data analytics tools to analyze post-holiday survey data quickly and effectively. Automated analysis helps you identify engagement patterns and isolate group trends by demographics, functions, or positions. This expedites informed decision-making to improve the post-holiday employee experience and reduce turnover.
Here’s what Ron Shory, Global Chief People Office at BGIS, said about SogoEX: “With Sogo, we were able to not just listen to our employees’ voices but manage their entire experience… that’s a powerful capability.”
3. Share insights and take action
The final and most crucial step is to plan and implement follow-up actions based on the survey findings. Here’s how you can do it effectively:
- Identify challenges employees face (excessive workload, communication gaps, inflexible schedules, financial stress, health concerns, work-life imbalance, etc.) and rank them based on their impact on morale and retention.
- Define and prioritize SMART goals to help employees overcome post-holiday anxiety and other challenges systematically and positively.
- To promote transparency, share the key survey insights and improvement plans with employees through in-person meetings or electronic communication channels.
- Track the progress of the employee engagement drive through monthly meetings and brief follow-up surveys to determine its effectiveness.
It shows your commitment to resolving employee concerns and creating a safe, caring workplace they can trust.
Using automated tools for post-holiday survey analysis
Technological advances have enabled automating a better part of your post-holiday survey analysis. Here’s how leveraging survey tools and technology can make your HR team’s life easier with a range of functions:
Secure automated survey platforms
With automated EX platforms, you can quickly and efficiently create, distribute, and analyze employee surveys. They offer pre-built, customizable surveys with the following interactive features:
- AI-based survey creation with advanced survey logic and branching
- Multi-channel distribution to reach participants where they are, increasing survey engagement
- Real-time tracking to see the number of respondents on the go
- Guaranteed anonymity to ensure participants’ privacy and get honest feedback
- Critical alerts about shifting response trends to take prompt action
- Automated reporting that requires minimal time and effort to analyze results
- Seamless integration to connect your databases with survey tools
- Robust data security to keep your organization’s data safe and secure
Visual dashboards for insights
Imagine being able to visualize survey results with charts and critical metrics highlighted in captivating graphics and vivid colors.
That’s what visual insight custom dashboards are all about. They allow you to monitor high-level data, plan strategies, access all data in one place, and personalize interfaces. With interactive dashboards, your HR team can track, analyze, and act on survey responses straightaway, driving effective data-driven decision-making.
In addition, you can explore your data more deeply to understand how different parameters relate, isolate key indicators, and discover insights through various reporting formats.
Grow your business with greater employee engagement
Post-holidays and every day, employee satisfaction drives engagement. Engagement drives productivity and retention. Retention impacts the bottom line: business profitability and growth.
Employee engagement is no longer optional but a must-have. By investing in improved employee experience and well-being, your business can further the beneficial cycle of engagement, retention, and growth.
A Forbes article states, “Organizational outcomes in retention and productivity are closely tied to employee experience, and companies usually perform better when employees are not merely satisfied but genuinely engaged.”
One of the simplest ways to drive higher engagement is to conduct post-holiday survey analysis and, based on the insights derived, improve employee experience.
Engage your employees today with the advanced survey and EX platform SogoEX. Contact our data experts to learn how to integrate it within your business systems.
