Employee engagement surveys require forethought and intention. Before you write or edit any questions, or accept a vendor’s standard set, your team should discuss why you want to conduct the survey. What do you want to measure? What information do you want to obtain? Use your specific engagement objectives to answer your questions.
It’s helpful to review previous surveys and questions and the corresponding results. This prior data may encourage you to rewrite confusing questions and/or eliminate unnecessary ones.
In addition to reviewing prior questions and results, review prior actions taken. Before you deploy any survey, decide how (and who) will respond to the results. If no one enacts survey-driven changes, your survey takers will see their efforts as largely useless. And the lack of action will hurt employee engagement, not help it.
Many employees are looking for the following characteristics in order to feel satisfied with their work: purpose, growth, value, flexibility, and support.
What questions should you ask in engagement surveys?
With your pre-survey work complete, it’s time to write a new employee engagement survey. Here are some of our favorite questions.
- Rate your level of belonging. This engagement question goes beyond the more common prompt, “I feel like I belong in this company.” By asking employees to rate their level of belonging on a scale of 1-5, you can get a better understanding of how different groups feel relative to each other.
- Do you feel supported in your role? If you want to ask a more specific question about support, include a prompt like, “My manager provides me with the support I need to complete my work.” Or “My mentor supports my professional development.”
- Do you understand what the company’s goals are? Setting goals helps keep employees motivated by creating a culture of accountability and tracking progress. This improves overall performance by enabling employees to stay focused and aligned with the organization’s strategic objectives.
- Are you provided with flexibility within your role to meet your obligations? Engaged employees and a healthy work-life balance have a profound influence on workplace dynamics. Engaged employees are more likely to put in their energy, creativity, and dedication into their roles. Rigid schedules and inflexibility can lead to burnout, decreased job satisfaction, and disengagement.
- Do you feel your ideas and opinions are valued and considered in the decision-making process? A sense of inclusion makes employees feel valued by their employer, which can ultimately lead to greater productivity and loyalty, resulting in lower job turnover.
- Are you provided with opportunities to grow professionally in your role? Knowledge workers thrive on learning new skills, so you’ve got a problem if they don’t have the chance to develop these skills within their roles. The development of new skills among your employees is beneficial to your company as a whole.
- Would you recommend your workplace to someone you know? Word of mouth is the single best source of recruitment for your organization. Your employees’ feelings about the company can be determined by whether they would recruit their friends or warn them to stay away from it. You can compare the results with past surveys by including this question regularly.
When employees complete engagement surveys, they want to see the results and the corresponding changes. When you share the results, provide key takeaways and communicate how you will address some of their top concerns.
If you fail to communicate survey results and survey-driven changes, employees will justifiably feel like participating in surveys is a waste of time. And worse yet, they may become disengaged. Take time to write intentional engagement surveys and use your results to truly help improve employee engagement.
