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Julia Neves It’s no secret that employee engagement can be a difficult thing to measure, but engagement surveys make the process significantly easier. They are one of the most popular engagement tactics—and for a good reason!
This blog post will walk you through what employee engagement is, why engagement surveys are important, and some tips on how to best implement them in your organization.
What is Employee Engagement?
Before we can fully understand what engagement surveys are and how they can be helpful, we first need to unpack the ins and outs of employee engagement.
Employee engagement refers to the level of connectedness and satisfaction employees experience at their jobs. It encompasses how employees think, feel, and act, and it can significantly impact the success of your business.
High employee engagement has been shown to decrease absenteeism and increase employee retention. It also affects how much pride employees have in their work and how likely they will recommend the organization to others.
Engagement is also linked to how much discretionary effort an employee puts in at work, meaning how often they go above and beyond their regular job responsibilities. For example, engaged employees might be more willing to stay behind and help out a coworker or put in extra hours to get their project finished on time.
Why are Engagement Surveys Important?
While engagement may seem like a pretty straightforward concept, it can be difficult for companies to understand the factors involved — this is where engagement surveys come in handy.
An engagement survey allows your employees to give direct feedback on how they feel about the work environment, your management style, and their overall satisfaction with your company.
As the manager, you can use these responses to make informed decisions about improving employee engagement and cultivating an inspiring workplace culture that benefits everyone.
Employee engagement surveys provide respondents with the opportunity to voice their opinions. They are a practical way to learn about employee sentiments, allowing you to gain valuable insight into problem areas of the workplace and make changes accordingly.
Best Practices for Conducting Engagement Surveys
By conducting engagement surveys properly, you’ll eventually see increased productivity within teams of engaged employees working towards common goals. Effective engagement surveys equip you with all the information you need to make specific and tailored changes to the workplace.
So how exactly do you successfully conduct an engagement survey? Here’s a list of the four best practices to help get you started:
1. Design Engagement Surveys Carefully
Careful planning is an essential part of any project’s success. Similarly, for your engagement survey to be effective, you need to plan it out and carefully design each question. Remember: a good engagement survey is unique and tailor-made to your company’s needs, issues, and goals.
When designing an engagement survey, something to keep in mind is to use a variety of questions that will help provide insight on various aspects of the company, including company culture, work-life balance, and customer-client relations.
By using engagement surveys that cover a variety of questions and topics, you’ll be able to get actionable feedback from your employees on how they feel across all significant areas.
Another thing to take into consideration is the simplicity of your questions. Engagement surveys are already long and tedious enough, so making questions confusing, convoluted, or vague will only make things more complicated for your employees.
Straightforward and easy-to-understand questions also help encourage participants to be honest in their responses.
2. Get Everyone to Participate
Engagement surveys should ask the right people the right questions to provide valuable data for managers to make decisions with; this means asking everyone, not just selected groups like new hires or management-level staff members.
In addition, engagement survey responses will give you more insight into how things currently are rather than relying solely on assumptions by gathering input from all types of workers, no matter their background.
By asking for everyone’s input, you avoid receiving biased opinions and inaccurate data; this will allow you to focus on facts and tangible evidence rather than hearsay and generalizations when making organizational changes.
When you announce the survey, make sure to explain your goal and purpose so that everyone is on board. Make it clear that the engagement survey is an avenue to be heard and to enact change. That way, everyone will be more motivated to participate.
Anonymity is another way to ensure active and effective participation. Ensuring anonymity or confidentiality encourages employees to be more honest as they answer the engagement survey, resulting in more accurate, insightful, and actionable data.
3. Present and Take Action on the Results
Although it may seem tempting to make changes immediately upon completing an engagement survey, this isn’t always the best approach.
Managers must present engagement survey findings first before coming up with solutions or implementing changes within their department as a whole. By doing so, participants can understand where problems are coming from and how they should be addressed going forward.
Presenting your results gives everyone involved in your organization a chance to voice any concerns or opinions about what was found during the evaluation process — input that might otherwise go unheard if changes are implemented too soon without being discussed.
Next, share your findings with senior management to know what is happening within their teams and departments, mainly if engagement levels are low or some issues need to be addressed by upper-level personnel. This way, problems can get resolved more quickly rather than getting stuck in limbo.
Once your engagement survey data has been presented and plans put into motion based on this information, managers should provide regular updates about progress made while following through on anything promised.
4. Don’t Forget to Follow Up
While it’s excellent that engagement survey data has been presented and action plans are being put into place, managers shouldn’t just jump ship after this point. Instead, they should follow up with staff members at regular intervals to see how things are progressing and if there have been any setbacks or roadblocks along the way.
As a result, managers show their commitment to making changes based on survey results. They can also find out if there is anything else employees would like changed or added since they are kept updated about these plans and their progress at every step of the way.
It is in everyone’s best interests to resolve problems sooner rather than later. An added benefit is that this will also ensure that staff members are more likely to participate in future engagement surveys.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Are The Four Types Of Survey Questions?
The four different types of survey questions are closed-ended, open-ended, numerical, and Likert scale.
Closed-ended questions are those that give the respondent only one answer to choose from.
Open-ended questions require a more lengthy response and can be challenging for respondents as it requires them to put forth more effort than simply choosing an option.
A numerical question asks participants to compare two or more objects with numbers, like rating their opinion of a product on a scale from one to five.
Finally, Likert scales are used for questions that involve participants rating their agreement with statements using numbers between different points. For example, the statement “I am happy at work” might be rated as strongly disagree (one), somewhat disagree (two), neither agree nor disagree (three), partially agree (four), and strongly agree (five).
What Can You Include In An Engagement Survey?
There are many different types of questions that you can include in an engagement survey. Some examples are:
- What is your favorite part of this job?
- How can we improve our company the most?
- How would you feel about taking on additional responsibilities here if they were offered to you?
Employers can also include “rating scale” questions or statements with which the worker must agree or disagree. These questions allow employers to measure the employees’ levels of satisfaction and engagement with certain aspects of their jobs; they can also help employers determine where exactly it is that workers feel issues lie.
How Many Questions Should an Engagement Survey Have?
An engagement survey typically contains between ten and fifteen questions, depending on the purpose of the employee engagement survey.
If it’s a general overview of company culture or an assessment tool for managers looking to improve their leadership skills, you might want something shorter.
On the other hand, if your goal is more specific, like gauging how often employees take breaks or whether employees take their paid time off, you might want more questions so that the data is comprehensive.
What Are The Tools Used For Effectively Measuring Engagement Levels?
Focus groups: Conducting focus groups is a great way to get employees involved in the engagement process. They can help you identify problems, brainstorm solutions, and even provide feedback on your proposed strategies.
Surveys: While there are many different types of surveys, they are an effective way for managers to discover what’s working and what isn’t when it comes to their employees.
Internal polls: Incorporating internal polling can help determine what employees think about the company, your current policies and practices, and how they feel about their job overall. Consider using online engagement software if you’re looking for a more robust solution that allows managers or upper-level staff to see results quickly.
Final Thoughts
The engagement survey is a valuable tool to help companies understand what their employees think and feel about their work. By giving everyone a voice, managers can use engagement survey results as tools for change to increase engagement levels within their teams and departments.
Engagement surveys can be challenging to create and conduct, but knowing how they work and what you can do to make the process efficient, effective, and successful should prepare you for the next time your organization needs to carry out an engagement survey!