Everything you Need to Know About Employee Engagement Surveys

What to ask, why it’s important and how you can put the learnings from your employee engagement survey into action.

Do you know how your people are feeling? Are they engaged and excited to start work every morning? Are they happy in their roles? 

If the statistics are to be believed, the answer to all of these questions is probably “no”. In fact, according to one recent report, just 21% of employees feel engaged at work. 

That’s a figure that should be ringing alarm bells for leaders everywhere. Why? Because employee engagement impacts everything from productivity and retention to recruitment and company culture. 

Put simply, employee engagement is one of the most important issues currently facing your business. So what can you do to measure it and how can you take steps to improve engagement within your organization? 

Read on to find out how employee engagement surveys can be your secret weapon to success. 

What is an employee engagement survey? 

If you want to know how engaged your employees are, all you need to do is ask.

Employee Engagement Surveys are an invaluable tool to help you measure your people’s commitment, motivation, purpose and passion for their work. These surveys give your employees a platform to anonymously share their open and honest feedback - that means you won’t only get to hear about what your organization is doing right, but also what it needs to improve upon. 

This gives you a baseline, a tangible score that lets you know exactly where your employee engagement is succeeding, and where it needs improvement. Armed with this invaluable insight you can take steps to address people’s concerns, and over time, create a more effective and efficient environment that makes more of your employees feel engaged. 

Then, if you want to know if your efforts are working, you can conduct another survey to see if anything has changed. Conducting your surveys on a year-to-year basis is a good way to benchmark your results and ensure that your activity is constantly focused on improving your engagement. 

Why is an employee engagement survey important? 

If you don’t actually stop to ask, how will you know how your employees are feeling? 

When it comes to something as important as your workforce you can’t base your decisions on hunches, or hearsay. Instead, you need cold hard facts. And the only way that you will get an honest assessment of your current engagement levels is through a survey.

Beyond the invaluable insight that they can offer, conducting an employee engagement survey also tells your people that their voice matters. Ask the right questions and your employees will feel like they are being heard and that you care about the issues that affect them. If you take this a step further and actively make changes based on their feedback, your people will feel like active participants in the future direction of your organization. 

It’s a virtuous cycle that makes your employees a key part of your bid for greater engagement. 

What questions should your employee engagement survey ask? 

By now you’re hopefully sold on the benefits of an employee engagement survey, but here comes the tricky part - what questions should you ask? 

You need to carefully pick the questions that you will ask to ensure that your people open up about the overall health of your organization and what you can do to improve it. Open-ended questions will encourage your people to provide feedback. Another great tool are so-called Pulse Surveys, which encourage respondents to answer their questions using a sliding scale. 

Finally, be sure to collect demographics information as part of your survey. Information like location, gender, tenure and race will help you to sort your data and identify trends among different groups. 

Example questions

To get you started, here are a few questions that you might want to consider including in your own employee engagement survey. 

• Are there any problems with our culture?
• Is there anything we need to change? 
• How can we help improve your engagement at work?
• Does your work challenge you?
• Do you feel your work has a purpose? 
• Have you thought about leaving the organization? 
• Do you see professional growth and career progression opportunities at this organization? 
• Would you recommend this as a good place to work? 
• Do you understand how you fit into the organization’s plans? 
• Do you feel like your work is recognized? 
• Does your immediate manager care about you as a person? 
• Are your goals and accountabilities clear? 
• Do you feel empowered to work to the best of your abilities? 

Want to learn more about how our best-in-class employee reward and recognition platform can help you increase employee engagement? Book a free demo to find out how Bucketlist can help you keep your people engaged.