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What better way to find out than conducting an employee engagement survey?
Engagement surveys help you get a clear idea of how things are at the employee's end and lets you know of any blockers to productivity. An employee engagement survey also helps you pinpoint reasons for dissatisfaction or low employee morale.
In this article, we'll cover:
An employee engagement survey is a powerful tool used by organizations to understand the level of engagement and satisfaction among their employees.
It consists of a series of questions designed to gauge how invested employees are in their work and the company, their feelings towards the workplace culture, their relationship with management, and their overall job satisfaction.
This feedback is invaluable for leadership and HR teams, providing them with the data needed to make informed decisions that can lead to enhanced employee morale, increased productivity, and, ultimately, better organizational performance.
When conducting an employee engagement survey, you want more than just a few numbers on a report; you're seeking genuine insights into how your team feels about their work, the culture, and the company as a whole.
These surveys provide a chance to hear directly from your employees and pinpoint areas for improvement.
Here’s are 6 objectives of employee engagement surveys.
1. Gauge Employee Satisfaction
Engagement surveys allow you to understand how employees feel about their roles, leadership, and environment. A happy employee is a productive one, but dissatisfaction can impact performance and retention.
2. Uncover Engagement Drivers
What motivates your employees? Engagement drivers—like growth opportunities or recognition—will help you understand what keeps them engaged and what might need attention.
3. Prevent Turnover
Surveys help spot issues that could be leading to high turnover. By addressing those concerns, you can improve employee retention and reduce the costs associated with hiring and training new staff.
4. Boost Productivity
Engaged employees are more likely to put in extra effort and work efficiently. Uncovering productivity barriers through these surveys will help you refine processes and increase overall performance.
5. Strengthen Company Culture
A positive work environment is critical. The feedback from engagement surveys lets you identify gaps in your culture and promote values that foster teamwork and inclusivity.
6. Align with Organizational Goals
Engagement doesn’t happen in isolation. These surveys help ensure your employees’ motivations align with the broader goals of your business, fostering long-term growth and success.
Each of these objectives helps create a more engaged, motivated, and productive workforce, which ultimately benefits both employees and the organization.
Creating an effective employee engagement survey involves several steps, each crucial to ensuring that the survey provides valuable insights into your team's morale and engagement. Here’s a step-by-step process on that.
1. Define Your Objectives
Begin with a clear vision of what you hope to accomplish through the survey.
Whether it’s enhancing job satisfaction, evaluating the impact of recent organizational changes, or gaining a deeper understanding of employee morale, setting specific objectives will steer the development of your survey in the right direction.
2. Choose the Right Questions
The questions should be directly tied to your objectives, encompassing a variety of formats like rating scales, multiple choice, and open-ended questions to gather a broad spectrum of insights.
Aim for clarity and neutrality in your questions to avoid any bias and ensure the responses you receive are genuine.
3. Ensure Anonymity and Confidentiality
Like we discussed earlier, assure your employees that their responses will remain anonymous and that the data collected will be treated with utmost confidentiality. This promise encourages transparency and honesty in their feedback.
4. Use a Simple and Accessible Format
The survey should be easy to complete and accessible to all employees. Whether it’s distributed electronically or on paper, ensure the format is user-friendly and can be completed in a reasonable amount of time.
Here's a preview of an engagement survey template on ThriveSparrow.
Try ThriveSparrow for free by signing up for a free trial now.
5. Communicate the Purpose of the Survey
Before launching the survey, communicate its purpose to your employees.
Explain how their feedback will be used to make meaningful improvements in the workplace.
This communication can be effectively done in two ways: by including an introductory statement at the beginning of the survey or by providing a detailed explanation alongside the survey link in the email you distribute.
This step ensures that employees understand the significance of their participation and how it can lead to positive transformations in their work environment.
With ThriveSparrow, you can communicate this on the survey or through email.
6. Pilot Your Survey
Test the survey with a small, representative group of employees to catch any potential issues, from confusing questions to technical glitches. This pilot phase is crucial for refining the survey before a full rollout.
7. Launch the Survey
Officially deploy your survey, offering clear guidance on how to complete it. Establish a firm deadline for submissions and issue reminders as necessary to ensure robust participation.
8. Analyze the Results
With the survey concluded, meticulously review the responses. Properly interpreting the survey results can help you identify patterns and actionable insights that align with your initial objectives can help guide your engagement efforts.
9. Share Key Findings and Next Steps
Communicate the survey’s major discoveries to your team, alongside outlining imminent actions. This transparency demonstrates your respect for their feedback and your commitment to positive change.
10. Take Action and Follow Up
Develop a targeted action plan based on the survey outcomes, prioritizing initiatives aimed at addressing key areas in need of improvement.
On ThriveSparrow's engagement survey reports, you can develop action plans alongside the survey response and checklist a list of initiatives you need to complete the action plan.
Conduct a free engagement survey, and view all these insights for free on ThriveSparrow.
After enacting changes, revisit your employees to assess the impact. This follow-up can take the form of additional surveys, focus groups, or casual conversations, ensuring a continuous loop of feedback and improvement.
This step-by-step process can help you create and implement an employee engagement survey that not only garners valuable insights but also fosters a culture of continuous growth and satisfaction within your organization.
Before getting into the actual process of generating an employee engagement survey, let us look at some of the important pointers to keep in mind.
1. Use Rubrics to Reduce Bias
While creating options to answer the questions, it is best to stick to a rubric that helps employees create an unbiased opinion.
Options can include ‘strongly agree’, ‘agree’, ‘neutral’, ‘disagree’, and ‘strongly disagree’.
The odd number of options also lets them take a neutral stand whenever necessary.
These options help us get an almost accurate and nuanced answer from the employees without bombarding them with complex options that are way too many in number.
2. Make Sure the Language Used is not Confusing
Clear and unambiguous language is the number 1 prerequisite to creating an efficient employee engagement survey.
Use too complicated and confusing language, and you can find employees dropping off incomplete surveys with inaccurate answers.
Make sure not to make choices for the employees by using biased language. Always keep in mind to use language and jargon that the employees are familiar with.
3. Use a Mix of Different Types of Questions
There is no thumb of rule that you have to stick to close-ended questions only while generating an employee engagement survey.
Include scaled questions along with multiple-choice and open-ended questions. It is best to keep the open-ended questions less in number as most employees might not have the time or energy to write a lot about their experiences or feelings.
They would much prefer to tick an appropriate box instead. So add a different question format to break the monotony but keep MCQs and scaled questions high in number.
If you run out of ideas on what to ask your employees, consider reading: 101 pulse survey questions for your ready reference.
4. Don't Make the Survey Too Long
Not every employee has the time to answer a long survey. Handing out long surveys to employees would only lead to them rushing the process and giving half-hearted answers.
Also, it might not be ideal for employees to take time off of their work to complete a super-long survey. So keep in mind to add only necessary and crucial questions to the survey.
Remove the clutter by editing and re-editing the questions and come up with a survey that takes not more than 20 mins long to complete.
5. Always Conduct a Test Run Before Launching the Survey
It is a great idea to test the survey with a small group of employees before actually opening it up to the rest of the organization.
It helps you spot any technical glitches present in the survey, conceptual errors, or any invalid or inappropriate questions. It will also give you valuable feedback from actual employees which can be used to give any final touches to the survey.
6. State the Objective or Purpose of the Survey Clearly
Why are you creating an employee engagement survey? What problem are you trying to solve with this?
What kind of answers do you expect to receive from the employees?
Ask these questions over and over while you create the employee engagement survey. It will help you keep track of the initial objective or goal of the survey is trying to achieve. Make these objectives clear and you can create an efficient survey in no time.
7. Keep the Confidentiality and Anonymity of the Answers
If you want to receive unbiased and unadulterated answers from the employees, you have to promise them anonymity and keep the individual results confidential.
Although you can announce the overall feedback from the survey to the employees, refrain from taking names or specific references from the employee answers to maintain the integrity of the process. It also helps the employees feel safe while giving their honest answers.
With ThriveSparrow's employee feedback surveys, you can configure the answers to your survey to show as anonymous. This way your employees can input what they truly feel making you look like an approachable person.
8. Analyze the Answers and Make Necessary Changes
The main purpose behind conducting an employee engagement survey is to find the answers you were looking for and implement the changes to make the life of the employees better.
Find out what every employee is trying to say and implement the changes and resolve the issues the employees face.
Let us now take a better look at the six easy steps through which you can create an efficient employee engagement plan.
1. Select a Survey Tool that Best Fits your Needs
This is where having a clear idea of your objective will come in handy. Pick a survey tool that has features that allow you to create questions that align with your initial objectives and goals.
You can create questions from scratch or use the template given in the survey tool to guide you through the process. Customize the questions depending on the employee demographic and make sure the survey tool gives you these options.
If you're looking for the tool to cater to these needs, ThriveSparrow is the place to go. Among its other features, the Engage module of this product offers an ideal solution to elevate your employee engagement surveys to new heights and understand the gaps to work on.
ThriveSparrow doesn't stop with creating the engagement surveys, but help you close the bridge of engagement at your organization with invaluable insights. Sign up here for early access now!
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2. Get the Leaders on Board
Before diving deep into the process, make sure to have the top management and concerned managers on board with the survey. At the end of the day, it is this group of management that looks at the results and deploys measures to make the necessary changes. If they are not on board, the whole process can be a futile exercise.
Get started with 19 thought-provoking questions every leader should consider asking their team.
3. Create an Air of Excitement for the Survey
Just like how you promote a product before its launch, create awareness of the survey among the employees and get them excited about the same. Let them know the reason why you conduct a survey and how it will have a direct impact on the work environment of the employee.
4. Launch it
The next step is the actual launch of the survey. It is best to send an email to the employees with the survey as an attachment. Or else you could use the good old way of handing over physical forms which the employees can fill out and give you later.
Which way to go is up to you and the structure of your organization. The aim is to make the survey reach every employee and make sure that they have the tools to answer it properly.
5. Observe and Benchmark the Results
Once the employees are done with their survey, collect the details and come to a conclusion.
What are the employees trying to say? Is there a common problem that persists among the employees?
What steps are you going to take in order to resolve these issues? Focus on these questions in the next step.
6. Share the Results with Others
The final step of an employee engagement survey is to share the feedback or message received from the survey with the organization. This will help employees feel recognized and heard. It will also give them an assurance that their problems will soon be mitigated by the organization.
Before we dive into the creation of an engagement survey, we recommend you to use this checklist for every engagement survey that you create.
When preparing to run an employee engagement survey, HR should ensure all steps are covered to maximize participation and gather meaningful insights.
1. Clarify the Survey's Purpose and Goals
Before launching the survey, it’s crucial to define why you're conducting it.
Are you aiming to understand employee satisfaction, identify engagement drivers, or pinpoint areas for improvement?
Communicate these goals clearly so employees know the importance of their feedback and how it will be used. This also sets expectations for both employees and the leadership team.
2. Keep It Short and Snappy
Lengthy surveys are a quick way to lose participation.
Aim to ask focused questions that are clear and easy to answer, sticking to key themes that directly impact engagement.
A concise survey increases completion rates while still collecting valuable insights. Prioritize the most important topics to avoid survey fatigue and respect your employees' time.
Here are a few fun ways to encourage survey participation among your employees.
3. Guarantee Anonymity to Encourage Honest Responses
Employees are more likely to provide truthful feedback when they feel safe from judgment or repercussions. Be transparent about how anonymity will be maintained throughout the process.
Whether through using a survey platform or ensuring data is aggregated, communicating this anonymity factor will help employees feel comfortable sharing their honest opinions.
4. Actively Listen to Feedback and Close the Loop
Survey results should lead to actionable changes.
After collecting responses, take the time to review the feedback, share key findings with employees, and outline steps the company will take based on the data.
Follow-up communication shows employees that their input matters, and creating action plans ensures you’re addressing the right areas for improvement. Closing the loop builds trust and strengthens the relationship between employees and leadership.
By following this checklist, HR can ensure employee engagement surveys are not only successful but also lead to meaningful improvements across the organization.
Why Use ThriveSparrow for Your Employee Engagement Surveys
- User-Friendly with Advanced Customization: Easy to use, yet highly customizable to suit your specific needs.
- Anonymity Guaranteed: Encourages honest feedback through strong privacy features.
- Real-Time Analytics: Get immediate insights into employee morale and engagement.
- Actionable Change: Turn feedback into real improvements with continuous feedback loops.
- Dedicated Support: ThriveSparrow's customer service ensures you’re never alone in optimizing your survey process.
Choose ThriveSparrow for surveys that drive genuine engagement and measurable results.
Wrapping Up
Employee engagement surveys help understand the pulse of your employees and how they currently feel about the company. It is an excellent tool to increase employee morale and productivity as well.
Always keep in mind that customization is key when it comes to surveys. Shape it in a way that fits your employee's needs and you can find the results to be not only useful but transformative as well.
