Getting Staff Feedback Valuable to Title Company Production
December 21, 2021
Based on over 50 years of employee engagement research, Gallup reports that engaged employees produce better business outcomes than other employees—across industry, company size and nationality, and in good economic times and bad.
However, according to Gallup, just 35 percent of American workers are engaged by their jobs. Fifty-two percent say they're "just showing up" and 17 percent describe themselves as "actively disengaged.
What can companies do to better engage employees? For Amy Niesen, senior vice president and general counsel for of Land Title Company of Alabama, surveying staff and getting feedback of how people feel has proved beneficial to her company.
Land Title Company of Alabama was involved in a pilot ALTA Employee Engagement Program to help it learn what it was doing right and what could be improved. ALTA has partnered with DecisionWise to help member companies measure and improve employee engagement by turning feedback into results. DecisionWise’s technology platform makes it easy to collect and analyze employee feedback on engagement and leadership.
“We learned from this process how important it is that your employees have the opportunity to really voice how they really feel,” said Niesen, who has been with Land Title of Alabama for about 30 years. “The candid nature of the answers that we received back were surprising in some ways and we were really able to use that information to successfully identify some key areas that we could improve on as a company and it's really things that we felt like as management felt we kind of had under control but having the candidate answers back from the employees as to what we may want to tweak or where we had room for improvement was truly a refreshing surprise really made it almost worth the entire process.”
Land Title of Alabama implemented the employee engagement survey during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Niesen said communication was already an area the company needed to improve on. Through the survey, Land Title of Alabama learned that some of its managers weren’t doing as well.
“It just really gives the higher-level management a better idea of what's going on at middle-management level,” Niesen said. “It's hard sometimes to stay plugged in from top to bottom and the employee engagement survey just did a fantastic job of really illuminating what was happening here in our company.”
Niesen recommended title agency leaders of all sizes to consider taking part in the program.
“This is helpful for all sizes of companies, especially if you don’t have a large agency with a human resources department or anything big. “it allows you to really look at yourself in the mirror.”
Contact ALTA at 202-296-3671 or communications@alta.org.