Employee Engagement Surveys

The health and wellbeing on your employees are of paramount importance. Not only do they affect their productivity, but they also determine their level of engagement towards your organisation.

Our previous piece describes employee engagement as the approach to improving your staff’s commitment to your organisational goals, objectives and values.

But because there’s no clear definition of employee engagement, it can be difficult to measure it. This is where employee engagement surveys come in. They’re a common way to measure engagement.

In this piece, we’ll explore employee engagement surveys and their benefits. We’ll also provide sample questions to consider when creating your survey.

What is an employee engagement survey?

It’s a survey that measures how valued your employees feel at your organisation. It includes carefully selected questions and the results help you to understand the engagement levels of your staff.

But why conduct an employee engagement survey? According to experts, there are several elements that contribute to the engagement of your staff. They are:

• Feedback
• Satisfaction
• Recognition
• Personal development
• Wellness
• Relationships at work (with peers and managers), etc.

With the right questions, surveys can identify issues with any of the above elements, all of which contribute to engaged employees.

Engaged employees contribute to developing your organisation and increasing profits. While disengaged employees can hinder, or even hurt, the company’s profits.

But why do employee engagement surveys matter? These questions are essential for determining how happy your employees are and how likely they are to stay at your company.

It’s important to know what to do with the employee engagement survey results. It’s one thing to conduct this survey but you must use the result to commit to both meaningful and lasting change.

You’ll need to interpret it to identify the current level of engagement and areas to focus on to improve it. However, you choose to analyse the data, the main areas to focus on are those:

• With the lowest scoring questions: where your organisation can stand to grow.
• With the highest year on year decline: this is where engagement has dipped, find out why.
• From individual departments: identify which teams are excelling and which aren’t. encourage them to learn from each other.

Benefits of employee engagement surveys

Employers are now starting to appreciate the numerous benefits of employee engagement surveys, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. As well as providing a way to measure your staff’s commitment, satisfaction and contentedness towards your organisation, it also presents other benefits.

These surveys can help to:

• Identify how long employees intend to stay at your organisation
• Provide valuable feedback to the organisation
• Provide insight into the current level of morale
• Allow employees to feel heard

Are employee engagement surveys really anonymous?

Yes, they are.

This is a major concern for employees and can affect the response rate of your survey. Staff members often worry about their anonymity when they’re sent these surveys. It’s out of fear of the repercussions of offering negative feedback or comments.

To address this, it’s important to reiterate that your surveys are anonymous. You should also avoid asking identifiable questions such as their job position, salary or age.

Sample employee engagement survey questions

Questions will differ depending on the type of business you run and the point of the survey. However, common questions include those relating to work-life balance, teamwork, feedback and growth opportunities.

There are different styles of survey questions as well, ranging from yes or no answered questions to open ended ones. This allows creation of a varied data set, giving a better chance to analyse the results. 

These questions will often ask things which will assess how engaged an employee is with the company, how they feel with their role and workload and what the culture is like. 

Expert support

Contact the health assured team for more information and assistance with issues relating to employee engagement. Call us now on 0844 892 2493.