What is an employee engagement survey?

An employee engagement survey is a questionnaire given to employees to gauge their current level of engagement with their job. You can use these surveys to see how employees feel about working for your company and ways in which things can be improved. An employee engagement survey can also help track how well your employee engagement initiatives are working and in what ways you can increase engagement within your staff.

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By conducting a survey for employee engagement, you can gauge the level of productivity, retention rates and overall happiness in the workplace. Additionally, by giving employees a chance to give feedback on how they are feeling about work, you will be able to prevent issues from happening. Doing regular employee engagement surveys is also a great way to find out about things that could turn into problems and fix them before they happen.

There are a few ways of using an employee engagement survey. One is where you give out small short surveys on a regular basis so that you can track the progress of an issue that you are trying to resolve. This can be done when your company is using engagement initiatives, and the surveys can be used as a benchmark on how you are doing.

You can also do a longer form of employee engagement survey that requires a bit more time to fill out and will give you more specific answers about how the employees feel about their work. These longer surveys would be done less regularly and are helpful when looking at big-picture issues like employee retention rates.

What is the purpose of employee engagement surveys?

Employee engagement surveys can be used to measure either internal benchmarks or external benchmarks. Internal benchmarks are used when the employee engagement survey is being used to gauge engagement issues within the company. External benchmarks are used to compare how your company is doing with employee engagement when compared to other companies or your competition.

For example, an external benchmark might be something like productivity levels in comparison to that of your competition. By doing an employee engagement survey, you will be able to see why your company is doing worse or better than the competition when it comes to productivity rates. Whereas internal benchmarks could be something like employee retention rates, where you might be comparing retention rates between departments.

Why employee engagement surveys are important?

Employee engagement surveys are important as they can help you recognize and fix issues. The following are some of the benefits of an employee engagement survey:

• Gives employees a voice. An employee engagement survey allows employees to voice their opinion about how the company is doing and talk about issues that are concerning them. It can also allow employees to give suggestions as to what would make them more engaged with work.
• Makes it easy for managers to monitor engagement levels. Without employee engagement surveys, it can be very difficult to know how engaged your employees are. A survey allows managers to see areas that are doing well and where things might need improvement.
• Boosts engagement levels. After performing an employee engagement survey, it is likely that employees will feel the need to engage more with their work. They will be more enthusiastic when engagement initiatives come up as they will also be more aware of the issues.
• Gives a clear idea of what needs to be improved. Employee engagement surveys allow companies to see exactly what needs improvement and how they might be able to get there.

With the above benefits, it is clear that doing employee engagement surveys can help employees, managers and the company as a whole.

Employee engagement survey process

When giving an employee engagement survey, you want to follow a strict process. This process will help you know how to administer the survey and use the results to improve employee engagement. This is especially important to do when there is a particular issue you are trying to fix. By using the following process, you will be able to make sure everything goes smoothly and have a clear idea of what needs improvement.

1. Identify the target employee group

By identifying what teams you want to look at with the survey, you will have a better understanding of the entire picture. You want to pick people who are from different departments so you can see if certain departments are more satisfied than others. Picking people from different departments will let you see if a particular department is having issues that you have not spotted.

Also, try to survey people in different roles (supervisor, manager, employee), so you get a wide range of perspectives. The more perspectives you have, the better you’ll be able to see how the company is running as a whole.

2. Define the objective of the employee engagement survey

Before administering the employee engagement survey, make sure to set a goal for the results. Knowing what you are trying to find out from the survey will allow you to focus the questions in a way that will give you clear answers.

For example, a common goal for an employee engagement survey is to determine ways to increase employee retention rates. With this goal in mind, you will be able to focus questions around job satisfaction so that you can get an idea of what would make employees more likely to stay.

By defining the objective of the survey, you will have more clarity as to what might be causing the issue and how to fix it.

3. Decide what questions to ask

Once you’ve determined your goal, you will be able to pick which questions to ask on the employee engagement survey. There is a myriad of questions you can ask on a survey, and you will need to narrow down what questions will be relevant to achieving your goal.

If you ask questions that are too broad in scope, you risk not being able to see where the problems are. By having a clear goal and then narrowing down your questions, you will be able to see how employees feel about specific topics.

You also need to decide what type of questions you want to ask. Depending on your goal, you might want more feedback in a specific area, which is where you can ask short-answer questions. For areas where you are just looking for a general idea, you can ask scale questions where employees are asked to rate something on a scale from one to ten. Having the right type of questions for the employee engagement survey can make your results more relevant to your goal.

4. Conduct the survey

Once you have everything ready, it is time to conduct the survey. Make sure that employees know that this survey will be done anonymously so that they can give honest answers and not worry about repercussions. Also, make sure that there is a clear deadline to get the survey in so that you are not waiting around for the last few surveys to come in.

There are numerous online survey companies, such as SurveyMonkey, that can help you prepare and conduct the survey, making the entire process easier for you. 

5. Receive the results and take action

Once you’ve received the results, take your time going over what the employee engagement survey is telling you. Perhaps have a team of other managers to help you interpret the results, so you know exactly what you need to do. If you made a clear goal for the survey, you should have an idea of ways to help with the issue if needed.

Do not let the survey results go by without taking some sort of action. Employees will want to know if anything was gleaned from the survey, so having a way of summarizing what was taken away from the results will be a good way to show employees that they did not take the survey without reason.

Then implement a plan for whatever changes might need to happen. This way, improvements can be seen soon after the survey, and you will have successfully increased employee engagement.

By using these steps, the employee engagement survey process will run smoothly. You will also be able to repeat the process when needed to continue using employee engagement surveys to improve your company.

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