What is employee engagement?
This article looks at how to conduct an employee engagement survey. First, it may be helpful to understand what ’employee engagement’ really means.
‘Employee engagement’ is an increasingly used expression in many organisations and yet there is no single definition of what this term actually means. It generally refers to a win-win working arrangement in which the employer provides the right conditions for employees to feel motivated to actively work towards the success of the business.
When there is high employee engagement, members of staff will typically go above and beyond the remit of their job description, something that is referred to as ‘discretionary effort’. Employee engagement is therefore a quality to be nurtured within an organisation and companies will often carry out surveys to establish the level of engagement within their workforce.
If this is a topic you’re interested in, you may find our article, ‘The Four Stages of Employee Engagement’ useful.
Why you need to understand the purpose of your survey
Before you start drafting your survey, it is important to clarify its purpose. What are you trying to achieve by conducting an employee engagement survey? Ensure this is clearly defined at the start so that leaders and management teams are able to communicate this clearly to employees.
The following questions may help you to clarify your purpose.
- What aspects of engagement should the survey focus on?
- How regularly do we want to rollout the survey? Once a year?
- When should the survey be rolled out? This should take into account busy periods for the business.
- What format is more appropriate for our business? Online or paper based?
- How do we want to use the data?
- Who is accountable for implementing, measuring and achieving the improvement plans based on the data of the survey?
- How can we engage employees in the process?
How to draft your employee engagement survey
There are several things to consider when designing your survey to increase response rate and to ensure the responses produce the data you need to make improvements. Here are our top tips.
1. Be prepared to address the results
This may seem like an odd point to start with, when planning your survey. However, it’s an important point to keep in mind from the outset.
You need to be prepared to address any issues that arise, otherwise you could risk damaging employee engagement instead.
For example, if staff respond negatively to questions around a particular topic, such as employee benefits, and you do nothing to address this issue, then this is likely to reduce employee engagement, rather than improve it. Effectively, you’ve ignored the response of your employees.
So, what do you do if there are areas that you know you’re not in a position to address at this time? Perhaps now isn’t the right time for you to be running the employee engagement survey. Alternatively, you could draft a survey that focuses on the factors you do have influence over.
Or ask specific, rather than open questions. For example, instead of asking: “How happy are you with your current employee benefits package?” it might be better to ask “We are considering introducing one further employee benefit this year. Consider the list below and please tick the option you would find most valuable.”
2. Draft questions that produce actionable results
Poorly drafted questions can prevent you from solving any problems that are highlighted. For instance, if you receive a poor response to the question “My line manager is trustworthy”, will you be able to ascertain what particular issues are causing this level of distrust amongst your employees? Is it because line managers are not sharing information? Or are they unfair in the treatment of their subordinates? Or they don’t provide adequate feedback?
Instead, draft questions which give you an idea of the action that can be taken to fix it. For example, if you received a negative response to the statement “My line manager communicates clearly with me”, you would have a better understanding of the interventions that might be necessary to resolve this issue.
3. Ensure your survey measures the impacting factors, not just “engagement”.
Employee engagement is typically measured by examining: the employee’s pride in the company; their desire to stay; how likely they are to recommend the company to others; and their motivation to go the ‘extra mile’.
However, there’s no point in measuring this in isolation. If you have a low employee engagement score then you won’t know what changes you need to make. Similarly, if you obtain a high employee engagement score then you won’t know what aspects are highly valued by your employees. So, you could inadvertently make changes that could have a negative impact on your engagement score.
Therefore, your survey should include questions on the factors driving employee engagement. For example, training and development, career progression, immediate management, performance feedback, communication, fair treatment, pay and benefits and job satisfaction.
In this way, you will be able to determine where there is a correlation between your engagement drivers and your overall engagement score.
4. Make your survey easy to complete
In order to draw conclusions from your survey, you need to obtain responses from a sufficient number of employees. Generally, internal surveys receive a response rate of between 30-40%. To help achieve this, you need to ensure your survey isn’t constructed in a way that inhibits people from completing it. Here are three factors that will impact how easy it is to complete the survey:
The length of the survey
The longer your survey is, the less likely it is that it will be completed by an employee. You need to be able to strike the right balance between asking a sufficient number of questions to draw robust conclusions and not asking so many that employees are put off starting or finishing the survey.
The wording of the questions
The questions themselves should be unambiguous and written in plain English. Any terms should be clearly defined to ensure participants are clear on exactly what is being asked.
How your employees can respond to the questions
You should ensure that employees are able to respond as easily as possible. The most common method is using a Likert scale to allow the individual to express how much they agree or disagree with a particular statement.
Free survey template
In conjunction with the Society for Human Resource Management Foundation (SHRM), SurveyMonkey produced an employee engagement survey template that’s available free if you create an account (which is also free) with them. It covers people management practices such as career development, working relationships, rewards and the working environment.
The survey template was produced from a large body of research that SHRM had undertaken alongside a thorough review of other studies and academic literature and opinions from employee relations experts. It is designed to be useful in any type of business, regardless of size and is suitable in the private, public and voluntary sectors.
However, the template isn’t prescriptive; it can be used flexibly to meet particular requirements or priorities and other questions can be added. The software also boasts analytical tools that help organisations to compile customisable reports on the results.
Those outcomes focus on identifying areas of improvement, designing action plans, monitoring problem situations, assessing the effect of interventions and comparing results over periods of time and within departments or locations.
You can find the employee engagement template here: Employee Engagement Survey Template
Benefits of outsourcing an employee engagement survey
It can be time consuming to put together an employee engagement survey, distribute it, monitor the response, and analyse the data.
Some businesses prefer to outsource an employee engagement survey to an external party. This reduces the time strain on the company, and can also increase response rates. You may find that employees are more likely to respond honestly if the survey is anonymous and the data is being handled by a third party adviser rather than their employer.
Please get in touch if you would like to discuss how we can help you conduct an employee engagement survey.
What to do with the results of your survey
Once you’re happy with your survey, and you’ve distributed it, the work is not over. Here are our tips for ensuring you get the best long term results from your survey.
1. Monitor the response rate
Once you have rolled out the survey, monitor the response rate. If you are noticing you’re not getting the desired response, there are a few ways you can boost participation. For example, do you need to send out a gentle follow up reminder? Or, can you enlist engagement survey champions to raise awareness about the survey and its purpose?
2. Analyse the data
Once your survey has been returned, analyse the data to identify key trends and themes that employees feel positively about. Also, take note of any areas that the majority of participants feel need to be reviewed and improved.
3. Staff forums and focus groups
Once you have analysed the findings of the questionnaire, we’d recommend holding a series of staff forums or focus groups involving a cross-section of the employees questioned. This would typically involve a discussion around the top positive and negative drivers found and any suggested actions that could be taken. Such meetings can reveal valuable insights that would otherwise be missed if looking at the data in isolation.
4. Communicate findings – ASAP
Communicate the key themes that arose from the survey to the leadership team and to all employees. This is to keep everyone informed, but also to reassure them that the data is being used for its intended purpose. The sooner you can communicate the findings after the survey has been completed – the better!
This will reinforce trust in the process and help to increase response rates for any future repeated surveys.
5. Improvement plans
Quite often employee engagement surveys are carried out, the results analysed, and then nothing more happens. This is a wasted opportunity. Instead it’s advisable to create a series of action points to implement, and engage employees with this process.
Update employees on the progress of the improvement plan to reinforce that the original survey is being taken seriously. This will further encourage them to take part in any later surveys.
Once these initiatives have had a chance to embed, the engagement survey should be repeated to see if they have had the desired effect. Such surveys should be repeated yearly, with potential pulse surveys throughout the year, so that you are continually working towards achieving a more engaged workforce.
We hope you found this guide useful. We are experienced in conducting employee engagement surveys. If this is an area where we can support your business, then don’t hesitate to contact us.
