For any business to stay highly productive, there is a need to monitor and evaluate employees’ engagement at regular intervals by utilizing an employee engagement survey.
The performance index of a company is related to how well engaged its employees are. Employees with a below-average interest in the company’s goals will record lower productivity ratios. And no employer wants that.
Most employees hand in a resignation notice because they are dissatisfied with how the company is run or because of insufficient paid time off. Other reasons could be so insignificant that they are overlooked by the company’s management. Any of these could result in the loss of your most valuable workers.
And this is why you need an employee engagement survey to measure the engagement level of your employees.
Creating an effective employee engagement survey, however, requires more than just penning down a few sentences with question marks. This article contains some valuable steps you need to consider when drafting your survey and how to maximize the raw data properly.
What Is An Employee Engagement Survey?
An employee engagement survey is a series of compiled questions aimed at collecting data anonymously from your workers. These questions usually include every factor that influences the work productivity of your employees. Some of the things to consider are:
- Do your employees understand their role?
- Are they okay with the work environment?
- What is their relationship with other workers?
- Are your employees able to easily communicate with the company’s management?
- Do your employees get the recognition they deserve after accomplishing a feat?
- Would they recommend their colleagues to your company?
- Are there company practices that need to be changed?
By considering these factors when creating a survey, you can determine how satisfied and aligned your employees are. Importantly, the information collected will help you patch some vital gaps between your workers and foster a holistic view of the company.
5 Simple Steps to Create an Effective Employee Engagement Survey
It is easy to just throw in random questions and have them printed out for your employees to answer. However, if you want the survey to be of benefit to your company, you should follow the steps below:
1. Establish A Goal
Before creating a survey, you need to define your expectations from the data collected. This will help you set the right benchmark, include the proper questions, and prioritize sections that are even more important.
To avoid overpopulating your survey list with different kinds of why- and how- questions, set your priorities and know the exact data you aim to collect from your employees. You should center your survey objectives on your company’s vision and values. Trust, respect, alignment, satisfaction, transparency, and communication are all essential values to consider.
When you have curated these values, set a benchmark that will guide the result of the survey. Do something like this:
- Respect: If at least 75% of our employees say they feel appreciated at work, then we have a high employee respect score.
- Satisfaction: If at least 50% of our employees feel satisfied with their salaries and extra perks, then we have a high satisfaction score.
Notice the use of the If-then statement and how it allows you to draw relative conclusions. You need to set specific percentages to ease the evaluation of the data collected.
2. Involve Top Executives
The engagement status of employees in your company is the sole concern of both the internal and external stakeholders. You need to discuss the survey content and objectives with the top executives to formulate an effective strategy.
You should involve managers, team leads, and the like, as it also aids their understanding of the data you eventually collate. A collective effort in creating and analyzing the survey outcome is very useful for devising lasting solutions to the areas where they are needed.
When you involve the top executives in your company, it shows that you value their opinion and are willing to listen to their suggestions. This is a good way to build rapport and trust between the employees and the management. Additionally, including them in the process gives them a better understanding of what goes into an engagement survey, and how it can impact the company as a whole.
3. Develop Relevant Yet Interesting Questions
To get honest feedback from your employees, you have to give them relevant and direct questions based on the values you curated. This step is another reason why involving the executives may be a good choice.
Now, creating questions that do not come off as generic to your employees can be a hassle. And this is where AI comes in.
You can use Jasper AI (a leading GPT-3 tool) to develop questions revolving around your company’s values. All you have to do on the interface is input your topic, audience, and tone for the AI to generate relevant poll answers and questions for your company.
Before regenerating the questions, you can anyhow tweak the initial outputs to steer AI in the right redirection.
You can carefully analyze the prompt I gave it – ”Generate some engaging Employee Engagement Survey Questions for a software HR firm”.
Keep generating more and more questions, and later you can pick only the most effective ones to include in your survey.
Rather than thinking what to include, thinking what to use is a better place to be in!
4. Keep It Short And Distribute The Survey
The key here is to create a short survey that maintains relevance and anonymity. The average time to complete these surveys should be around 10–15 minutes.
Once you are done creating the employee engagement survey, it is time to share it with your employees.
You also want to give workers adequate time to process and answer these surveys. A one-week deadline from the date of distribution is a good start. There is a high possibility of getting insincere results if the submission time is too short. And if the submission deadline is too long, the survey might lose its relevance.
Additionally, you could offer rewards based on the completion of the survey. However, you should be careful with this. Most employees might answer the survey with invaluable information just to claim the reward.
5. Publicize Survey Results And Act On It
Sharing the survey results with your employees helps to build trust and increases transparency. Let them know the recorded index and understand how it affects their workplace productivity.
Now that you have the data, highlight those areas where your company is doing well and address the factors contributing to a lack of employee engagement.
Doing so will bring about change and improve employee satisfaction.
Engage your employees in the decision-making process by involving them in solving the identified problem areas. This will help to build a sense of ownership and responsibility among employees.
When it comes to employee engagement, sharing is caring! Publicizing survey results helps to build trust and transparency within the firm.
Conclusion
Most companies fail to understand the importance of good employee engagement. Your company will notice a considerable increase in productivity if the engagement level is relatively high. Moreover, you will find it easier to retain your best workers.
Also, retaining the best employees lead to compounded returns over time. We are really bad at exponential thinking.
The logic is simple – if you have a great team, they will continue to attract other great workers, and the company will continue to grow.
Conducting an employee engagement survey is one of the best ways to determine how engaged your employees are. This will give you valuable insights into what makes your employees tick and how you can aim for improvement.
