In today’s environment, employee feedback is more crucial than ever. Let’s face it – employees have options, and so do you. Your task is to do what you need to do to lure, motivate and keep top talent. That means learning about and improving the employee experience. If you want to build a stronger workforce, you’ve got to be about gaining actionable insights.
Surveys are the most popular ways to get employee perspectives, but that annual questionnaire no longer cuts it. You need to do them more often. But what to include in an employee engagement survey? Let’s look.
What Are Employee Engagement Surveys?
Such surveys evaluate employees’ perspectives of their workplace and the work they perform. They gauge employees’ loyalty, drive, sense of purpose, and passion for what they do as well as their company.
Why Are Such Surveys Important?
Surveys that are painstakingly crafted and conducted can illuminate quite a bit of info about employee views that leaders can use to enhance the employee experience. If management takes the feedback to heart – which it totally should, otherwise why do them – you could see better retention reduced absenteeism, more productivity, improved customer service and an all-around happier workplace.
Oftentimes, just the knowledge that you care what employees think is enough to boost morale. What’s more, surveys can lead to managers discovering issues with their departments that they can remedy – sometimes quickly.
One proviso, however: if you’re going to conduct surveys, you’d better do something about the results. If your employees feel like you’re full of hot air, that could have the opposite effect.
What Goes in Employee Engagement Surveys?
You can conduct surveys all day and all night, but if the questions aren’t good, they don’t mean much at all.
To gain improved understanding of your workforce and produce favorable business outcomes, you need to delve into the nitty gritty of the employee experience, that means employee engagement, leadership, team effectiveness, and organizational culture.
What’s best is a “listening program” that blends the appropriate methodologies with content and nimble technology. An effective employee engagement survey produces action-ready integrative analytics and insight. That means employee engagement as well as pulse surveys.
What Are Pulse Surveys?
A pulse survey is a brief, fast survey of no more than 15 easy-to-answer questions that you conduct periodically, be that weekly, monthly, quarterly, or whenever. It provides a quick check of employee satisfaction levels, work relationships, job position, and work culture. These surveys usually concentrate more on a certain subject or a clutch of associated topics. On the other hand, employee engagement surveys usually cover a broader range of topics.
The good thing about pulse surveys is that they permit your employees to express what they’re going through now, as opposed to three months ago. They promote immediate action or investigation, and because they’re given regularly, you have some means of ongoing comparison.
Such surveys are looked upon favorably by employees too. While the average employee engagement survey merely garners a 30% to 40% response rate, pulse surveys have a response rate of a whopping 85%.
Now that you know what to include in your employee engagement survey, you can get right to the heart of what your workforce thinks about the organization and the job they’re doing. If you’re into recruiting and maintaining employees, this is knowledge you need. But remember, misinterpreting results or failing to react to what you learn will likely be counterproductive. If you need help with your surveys, it’s best to contact a consultant like Mercer.
