Steps to Create an Effective Employee Engagement Survey

The level of engagement of your employees can affect your company’s efficiency, productivity and the bottom line financially.

You might have a rough idea of how engaged your employees are, but you could also be way off the mark. An effective way to measure the levels of employee engagement in your organization is through an employee engagement survey.

By surveying your staff you can gather valuable feedback and, if appropriate, use it to make changes to your company on your employees’ behalf. If implemented correctly, you can then optimize the engagement of employees and improve your organization’s performance.

To effectively gauge the mood of your employees, you should endeavor to measure the pride they feel in your organization, their intention to remain with the company, their motivation to exceed expectations and how likely they are to recommend the business to their friends and families.

These are factors you should consider when developing an employee engagement survey:

Determining what you want to measure

Do you have just a few factors of employee engagement you would like to measure and improve? Are you concerned about a specific issue? Or do you want to know about everything?

Involve key leaders in the organization

Key leaders should be involved to help prioritize issues…. What do they really need from the people who work for you in order to be successful?

Set objectives

What do you want to do with the results? You can’t measure everything and you may not be able to fix every problem, so setting realistic goals is crucial.

Expect lack of enthusiasm

Chances are some of your employees have been around the block a few times before and will view your engagement attempts with cynicism. Perhaps they worked somewhere else where employee engagement attempts were seen as “lip-service” or perhaps previous management regimes in your company failed to deliver and meet employee expectations. There’s a good chance your disengaged employees – the ones you really want to hear from – will regard your attempts as a time wasting exercise.

Define the questions

Once you’ve determined what you want to achieve and what you’d like to measure, you’ll need to come up with the right questions to ask.

Deliver the survey on the right platform

Consider a digital solution like DeskAlerts to deliver your survey to your employees straight to their desk tops. Using the DeskAlerts system will require the employee to take action and they can’t minimize or ignore the message. With DeskAlerts you can see the results of the survey virtually in real time as your employees respond.

Communicate the results

Your staff will want to know what you are going to do with the feedback they have provided you. Once you have had time to digest the results of the engagement survey, you will need to examine the data and identify areas for improvement. While it might not be possible to address every single area that employees have highlighted, you should create a plan to solve a few key priority areas, and communicate your intentions to do so with your employees.