How To Create An Effective Employee Engagement Survey?

An effective employee engagement survey is essential to maintain high productivity in any business; it’s crucial to consistently assess and measure employee engagement.

A company’s performance is closely tied to the level of engagement among its employees. When employees show minimal interest in the company’s objectives, productivity tends to suffer, a situation no employer desires.

Many employees resign due to dissatisfaction with the company’s operations or inadequate paid time off, among other reasons, some of which may seem insignificant to management. Any of these factors could lead to the loss of valuable employees.

And this is why you need an employee engagement survey to measure the engagement level of your employees.

However, creating an effective employee engagement survey requires more than just penning down a few sentences with question marks. This article contains some valuable steps 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 to collect data anonymously from your workers. These questions usually include every factor that influences your employees’ work productivity. 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. Significantly, the information collected will help you patch vital gaps between your workers and foster a holistic view of the company.

Now, engagement surveys can't really be dull and dry, right? A conversational approach is a must in order to keep your employees hooked! 

Here's a survey template that you can roll out right away. Feel free to try it out and customize it if you like!

Employee Engagement Survey Template

Preview Template

Use This Template

5 Simple Steps to Create an Effective Employee Engagement Survey:

It is easy to throw in random questions and print them 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 must define your expectations from the collected data. This will help you set a suitable 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 feel appreciated, we have a high employee respect score.
• Satisfaction: We score high if at least 50% of our employees feel satisfied with their salaries and extra perks.

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 the data collected.

2. Involve Top Executives

The engagement status of employees in your company is the sole concern of internal and external stakeholders. You must discuss the survey content and objectives with the top executives to formulate an effective strategy.

It would be best to 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 beneficial for devising lasting solutions to the areas where they are needed.

Involving the top executives in your company shows that you value their opinions and are willing to listen to their suggestions.

This is an excellent 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.

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. 

Creating questions that are not 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 about 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 tweak the initial outputs to steer AI in the right direction.

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; later, you can pick only the most effective ones to include in your survey.

Rather than thinking about what to include, thinking about what to use is a better place to be!

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 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 extended, the survey might lose relevance.

Additionally, you could offer rewards based on the completion of the survey. However, it would be best if you were careful with this. Most employees might answer the survey with invaluable information 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. An effective employee engagement survey can give insights from the organization to make informed decisions.

Doing so will bring about change and improve employee satisfaction.

Engage your employees in decision-making 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 an effective employee engagement survey, sharing is caring! Publicizing survey results helps to build trust and transparency within the firm.

Try SurveySparrow to create an employee engagement survey! 

Implementing an Effective Employee Engagement Survey

Employee engagement is essential for a productive and motivated workforce. To implement an effective employee engagement survey, follow these steps:

1. Define Objectives: Clearly outline your goals for conducting the survey. Determine what specific aspects of employee engagement you want to measure and improve.
2. Select the Right Survey Tool: Choose a reliable survey platform like SurveySparrow that offers features tailored for employee engagement surveys. Ensure it can provide anonymity to encourage honest feedback.
3. Create Relevant Questions: Craft well-thought-out questions that address your objectives. Questions should cover job satisfaction, work-life balance, communication, and growth opportunities.
4. Anonymity and Confidentiality: Assure employees that their responses will remain anonymous to encourage honest feedback. Confidentiality builds trust.
5. Survey Distribution: Decide how you’ll distribute the survey. Email is a standard method, but consider other channels like company intranet or mobile apps for convenience.
6. Timing: Choose a suitable time for the survey. Avoid periods of high stress, such as right before a major deadline.
7. Communicate Clearly: Inform employees about the survey’s purpose, how long it will take, and the deadline. Stress the importance of their participation.
8. Follow-Up: Send reminder emails to employees who haven’t completed the survey. A gentle nudge can improve response rates.
9. Data Analysis: Once you’ve collected responses, analyze the data carefully. Look for trends and patterns to identify areas that need improvement.
10. Action Plan: Based on the survey results, create an action plan to address issues and improve employee engagement. Involve employees in this process to make them feel heard.
11. Regular Surveys: Implement employee engagement surveys regularly, such as annually or semi-annually, to track progress and maintain a culture of continuous improvement.
12. Feedback Loop: Communicate the survey findings and action plan to employees. Show them that their feedback led to positive changes.
13. Evaluate Progress: Continuously assess the impact of your engagement initiatives and adjust your strategies as needed.
14. Celebrate Success: Acknowledge and celebrate improvements in employee engagement. Recognize and reward employees for their contributions to a more engaged workplace.
15. Seek Professional Guidance: If needed, consider consulting with experts in employee engagement or organizational development to refine your strategies.

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 leads to compounded returns over time. We are terrible 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 your employees’ engagement. This will give you valuable insights into what makes your employees tick and how you can aim for improvement. If you would like to build an effective employee engagement survey, you could check out SurveySparrow’s