Measuring employee engagement using surveys

What is employee engagement?

Employee engagement is the way a person thinks, feels, and behaves to support the objectives of their company. The results of an employee engagement survey allow you to evaluate the data and take appropriate action to raise employee engagement levels.

Why are surveys of staff satisfaction so important?

You should conduct employee engagement surveys for your company for four major reasons:

Identify the variables that influence your employees’ happiness, interest, and enthusiasm to gauge their level of engagement (or not).
To offer employees a voice so they can discuss problems, and the culture of the business, make suggestions, share observations, and feel heard.
To encourage participation: Despite having high employee satisfaction ratings, there is always room for growth. The location of those experience gaps, no matter how tiny, is revealed by employee feedback.
To promote company expansion: Employee engagement survey results can help you identify company areas that need improvement.

Conducting employee engagement questionnaires step by step

1. Commence with the survey plan

To produce the best potential results and data, designing a successful employee engagement survey requires careful consideration. Keep your survey’s organization basic and clear, to begin with. Employees must learn how to respond to the questions, and your managers must learn how to interpret the report. You want as many employees as you can to be aware of and take action in response to the engagement survey findings.

The following are some additional considerations you should make before beginning:

Determine whose opinion is necessary and whose input is not necessary (manage expectations by explaining why you are not consulting them).
Define deadlines and turnaround periods clearly from the beginning.
To assign someone else, ask participants to let you know in advance if they are unable to make the deadline.
Make it obvious to everyone involved in the sign-off process that when one person says something is final, it truly is final by establishing one person for the final sign-off.
Separate “nice to have” from “must have” queries.
Avoid having a committee create your employee engagement survey.

2. Create inquiries to pose to your staff

Your employee engagement survey should not only assist you in resolving issues at your company but also highlight the things that, in the minds of satisfied workers, you are doing well. You must be certain that your inquiries will yield pertinent information about their job exto order to achieve this.

Don’t stress if you’re having trouble coming up with the best employee engagement survey questions. By creating your employee engagement survey, you can avoid forcing questions to fall into predetermined models and instead create questions that are 100% relevant to your business. This will help keep your survey short and simple to understand.

Three main topics should be covered by your inquiries:

Worker involvement

The intent to remain, work involvement, discretionary effort, pride in the business, and willingness to recommend the organization are all measured by the questions at the beginning of your survey.

Key topics

With inquiries about autonomy and freedom, career advancement, collaboration, communication, leadership, recognition, resources, strategy, management support, and training and development, these explore the factors that may contribute to (or detract from) employee engagement.

3. Select the topics you plan to assess.

The next stage is to decide which themes you want to gauge, after which you should develop survey questions about employee engagement that support those themes. As a general guideline, try to ask 30 to 50 questions about employee experience. Don’t forget to include a method to track demographics as well.

Autonomy / Empowerment – Are people empowered in their roles and able to innovate on the job?
Career Progression – Are there opportunities for people to grow and develop in the company?
Collaboration – Are they able to easily work with other teams or colleagues without barriers or conflict?
Communication – Are they getting enough info from the company about what’s happening and do they feel they’re being listened to?
Company Leadership – Do employees believe in and trust their senior leaders?
Recognition – Do people feel that they’re recognized and appreciated?
Resources – Are they enabled to do their job through the equipment they’re given?
Strategy Alignment – Do they buy into where the company is going and how they’re a part of it?
Supportive Management – Are managers supporting their teams to be successful?
Training and Development – Do they feel they have the training they need to do their job?
Customer Focus – Are they in a customer-centric organization and are they empowered to do what’s needed?
Diversity & Inclusion – Do they feel the organization is inclusive and fair to all employees?
Pay & Benefits – Do people feel they’re fairly rewarded for what they put in?
Quality of Product or Services – Do people believe in what they (and/or the organization) provide to their customers?
Safety – Do people feel their safety is critical to the organization?
Social Responsibility – Do they feel the company is a good corporate citizen with a worthwhile cause?
Work-life Balance – Do they feel the company allows them to achieve the balance they need between work and personal life?

Tip: We advise using a 5-point Likert scale for all topics in employee engagement surveys to follow the industry norm:

Scale of Adherence: Extremely From Fully Agree to Agree
Very Excellent to Very Poor is the rating range.

Great employee involvement survey question examples

You can determine the present level of employee satisfaction by using these useful sample questions for an employee engagement survey. You’ll see that a number of the important engagement themes listed above are covered by the questions.

Q1 How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with your ability to do interesting work in your role?

Q2 How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with your ability to apply your skills in this role?

Q3 How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with your current workload?

Q4 How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with your opportunities for career progression?

Q5 How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with the physical environment at your workplace?

Q6 How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with your relationship with your manager?

Q7 Overall, how satisfied or dissatisfied are you with your current employer?

Examples of poor employee engagement survey questions

The point of employee engagement survey questions is to achieve accurate responses and a high employee feedback response rate. By including questions that are obscure, too difficult to answer, too demanding, or too personal, you risk your survey being abandoned or discredited. Some terrible questions about employee experience we have seen include:

Q1 Does traveling for work affect your relationship with your partner (if you have one)? Far too personal and intrusive!

Q2 Does your manager appear to favor some employees over others? Who? Employees will be too afraid to answer this and unwilling to snitch on colleagues

Q3 What has been your experience of working with the company over the last year? Where to begin with this? Do you want an essay? Far too long and demanding.

Q4 On a scale of 1 to 10 how fairly do you think your manager treats the team? (1 being extremely unfair, 10 being very fair) Fairness is a subjective concept, particularly when you are being asked to answer for other people as well here, and impossible to pin on a scale of 1 to 10. There’s no definite answer, therefore a pointless question.

Q5 What KPIs do you think we achieved B2B in the YTD? Just what does this mean? (Translation: what key performance indicators do you think we achieved business to business in the year to date?) Avoid jargon and acronyms in your surveys, although even without the acronyms this is a pretty poor question.

Your checklist for the staff engagement survey

The needs of each company will differ when it comes to measuring employee engagement. We’ve detailed the steps to take to set up your employee engagement survey, developed a survey template, and accelerated the process.

Task	Tip
Get started	Try our free employee engagement survey template.
Determine who will review and approve content	While several people and teams should review content, avoid having more than one leader approve content. This will help you eliminate lengthy sign-off processes once you have a final question set.
Set clear deadlines and turnaround times	For everyone involved.
Involve key leaders when prioritizing issues	Solicit opinions and ideas from stakeholders to better understand organizational needs. What do the heads of your business really need from their people in order to be successful?
Review and customize the engagement categories	Remove any you don’t think are relevant to your organization, and add any new ones you would like to include.
Review the questions	Within each of the categories you have left.
Distinguish ‘nice to have’ questions from ‘must have’ questions	And adjust the questions to fit your needs. Maintain at least three questions in each category.
Include necessary definitions on your survey	For example, many companies include a definition of “Your Manager”, “Your Team”, “Senior Leadership” and “This Organization” to ensure people use the same frame of reference when responding. These can be shown at the beginning of a survey or, depending on your survey vendor, as individuals hover over questions.
Send your questionnaire for review and approval	Typically you should expect around two to three rounds of iteration which can take at least two weeks.

4. Conducting your poll

Invite every employee in your business to participate in the survey so you can get the most responses possible. Also, pay careful attention to the response rates. To offer people the best chance to provide their feedback, you might need to leave the survey open for two to three weeks.

5. Assessing staff involvement

What elements affect interest, then? We calculate the employee engagement number as the sum of the following five factors:

Employees’ likelihood of intending to remain with the business for the next two years is measured by their intent to stay.
Work involvement is the mental and emotional effort individuals put into their jobs.
Discretionary effort is the amount of work that individuals are willing to do that is above and beyond what is necessary.
The degree to which employees feel proud to work there, or pride in the business
Willingness to suggest the company – how likely are people to tell their family and friends about their company?

Each of these factors yields a score, which when added together, provides a general indicator of employee involvement.

6. Using data to tell a tale

A screen full of figures and statistics doesn’t inspire or excite anyone. However, if you combine your statistics with a compelling visual narrative, you can captivate your audience and elicit enthusiasm and action. Anyone who views your data will be emotionally affected if you add a story to it:

There are three things you need to set up when creating graphic storytelling that really emotionally engages the result of your data:
Ask the appropriate queries first: What do the numbers indicate? Who requires access to this data? How can we convey that to the appropriate group of people? What impact can we have with that?
Identify your audience: What are their knowledge levels? How advanced are they? How well-versed in the topic are they? You can start designing your visual narrative using all of this information as a guide.
People want knowledge delivered as quickly and easily as possible, so simplify, simplify, simplify. Avoid attempting to do too much at once. Edit your information and statistics to only include what is absolutely necessary to support your claim. Make your next visual to support your subsequent argument. Instead of attempting to complete it all at once, think of it as piecing your narrative together one chapter at a time.

Measuring employee engagement using surveys

What is employee engagement?

Why are surveys of staff satisfaction so important?