Hiring great people is one thing. However, to achieve growth and success, the key lies in retaining them over the longer term.
Employee engagement is a crucial part of talent retention because engaged employees are more satisfied with what they do. They find fulfilment in achieving their tasks and they are happy working with their colleagues and assisting your customers.
How your employees feel towards their job also impacts the ways they deliver results and contribute to the overall goals of your business.
So, how do you measure their engagement? By conducting an employee engagement survey.
When done correctly, it can help you assess employee situations better and gain helpful insights for overall business improvement.
What is the purpose of employee engagement surveys?
As part of the Human Resources (HR) or management team, you understand how integral genuine feedback is to make improvements and avoid a negative culture.
An employee engagement survey allows them to share their thoughts on how motivated they are, how involved they feel in the company’s processes and how satisfied they are with your overall culture. Through this, you can easily track engagement levels and identify areas of improvement. You can also address issues which may have been overlooked before.
Most importantly, by establishing continuous listening and open communications, employee engagement surveys allow you to build stronger relationships with your employees – especially when they can see action being taken.
Just keep in mind that employee engagement surveys must be taken seriously if you wish to gain valuable information from it. It’s not just about asking a few random questions - your team needs to set the necessary goals, formulating the right questions and facilitate a comfortable survey approach.
To guide you, here are some of the best practices for conducting employee engagement surveys.
What are the best practices for conducting employee engagement surveys?
Employee engagement surveys take time, effort and resources from both the management team and your employees.
That’s why it’s a smart approach to use best practises - so both parties will benefit from it. When done right, you’ll gain feedback that will help you enhance your employees’ experience and attitude towards the company, while providing them with a way to share their opinions freely.
Try incorporating the following:
1. Explain the purpose of your survey.
Communicating your reasons for conducting an employee engagement survey will help you encourage employees to participate. Especially focus on explaining how the survey will be facilitated and how the results affect them so everyone feels comfortable and invested.
2. Guarantee confidentiality.
Employees are often afraid of backlash if they are too honest – which can make them hesitant to share their concerns. However, if they aren’t honest, you don’t get the feedback you need. Ensuring that they won’t be personally identified by their responses will allow them to answer truthfully.
3. Make sure to begin and end your survey with an easy question.
If you start with a difficult question, employees might feel reluctant to continue the survey thinking that all questions will be as hard as the first one. Ending it with a much lighter question will also help you leave them with a good experience.
If you’re using a standard Pulse Poll or a Pulse Survey, you must choose your own questions – so be careful with how you frame them as this can affect the outcome of your results.
If you’re using a QWL Poll (Quality Of Worklife), there are scientifically researched questions that don’t need to be modified – it’s all done for you. More on this in our next blog.
4. Avoid vague and open-ended questions.
For every question, focus on one topic or area of concern only. This is important as not to confuse employees and to help you analyse results easily. Providing close-ended choices can also lead to more measurable results.
Again, note the difference between standard Pulse Poll Surveys and QWL Surveys as mentioned above. A QWL Poll already has the right questions prepared to maximise insights, efficiency and accuracy. Read more in our next blog.
5. Try to make the survey as brief as possible.
Long surveys intimidate employees, so it’s better to keep the survey as short as possible. A regular survey should only take 5-10 minutes to avoid disruption.
6. Provide rewards or recognition.
Don’t forget to show your appreciation. Give thanks to all those who answered the survey. If possible, provide them with incentives so they remain motivated to fill the questionnaires out.
7. Share results and action plans.
Being transparent with the survey results will help your employees feel that you took the time to consider their opinions. It will make them realise that you’re serious about making changes, too.
Also, don’t forget to share your action plans. This will give employees something to look forward to.
What are some ideal questions to include?
Employee engagement surveys are designed to measure several factors that can be used to measure employee motivation, performance and retention.
To do this, your survey must ask them about the level of connection they have with the company, the impact of their job, their feelings toward accomplishing tasks and their future career goals.
If you’re conducting a standard Pulse Poll or a Pulse Survey, you must choose your own questions – so it’s crucial you think these out carefully to get the insights you’re after.
To help, here are some questions you may include in your own employee engagement survey. For these examples, the answers are a scale: strongly disagree, somewhat disagree, neutral, somewhat agree, strongly agree, to measure how much employees agree with each statement.
- I feel like I have a purpose in my job.
- I feel like I belong in this company.
- I’m eager to go to work every single day.
- My job offers flexibility for me to contribute my own ideas.
- I have all the resources I need to excel in my job.
- The tasks I accomplish each day are vital to the company’s success.
- I trust the leadership’s team approach in running the company.
- The management recognise my contribution.
- I can see myself working here in 5 years or more.
- I am proud to work for this company.
- I will recommend this company to my friends and family.
If you’re still confused about how to create your own employee engagement survey or if you are not confident in building it from scratch, you can always rely on advanced tools like VibeCatch to help you gather insights from employees accurately and efficiently.
VibeCatch uses a unique QWL Poll (Quality Of Worklife), that ask consistent and scientifically researched questions to obtain the right information.
What is VibeCatch?
VibeCatch is a HR platform based on 15 years of proven research, offering you the opportunity to make a difference and prove the impact that you know you make every single day for the people around you.
Through VibeCatch’s QWL Polls, Pulse Polls and 360 Feedback Polls, you can uncover hidden opportunities, correct issues and address areas of improvement for both employees and management.
This time, you in the HR department will be able to work based on reliable information and you can now have a tangible Return on Investment (ROI) to present to management.
Book an obligation-free consultation and we’ll discuss your options to show you how VibeCatch can help you help everyone.
