How to Conduct an Employee Engagement Survey

Employee engagement is critical to an organization's success, ensuring staff is productive and happy with their work. If you’re not sure how engaged your employees are, conducting an employee survey is one of the best ways to determine your organization's engagement. These surveys help measure employee motivation, satisfaction, and output to get a pulse on how employees feel and where to make improvements for better engagement.

Many organizations use pre-written surveys, while others compile their own questions for more specific answers. In this guide, we'll explore the top tips on how to conduct an employee engagement survey, including its benefits, best strategies, and results.

Benefits of Employee Engagement Surveys

Employee surveys can provide a range of insights for employers, from assessing dips in productivity to measuring employee satisfaction. As the name implies, these surveys aim to help employers better understand their teams’ engagement and contributing factors. Many employee surveys are centered around areas for improvement, while others focus on motivation. 

All in all, employee engagement surveys can seriously benefit your organization by giving staff a chance to share their thoughts. Showing employees you're interested in feedback may even open up more conversations about engagement and company culture.

How Different Engagement Surveys Work

There are countless types of survey templates available online to customize for your business. The questions you choose should depend on what you plan to do with the results. For example, should employees rate their workplace experiences in different situations, or are you seeking specific responses about an issue in your company?

When selecting survey questions, consider the following question styles:

• Dichotomous: These questions only have two possible answers, such as "true" and "false" or "yes" and "no." Employee surveys should use dichotomous questions when seeking concise answers rather than opinions. 
• Multiple choice: Multiple choice questions give employees numerous answers to choose from – usually three or four answer options. These types of questions provide categorical results and can help identify different variables impacting engagement, including coworker interactions and workload. 
• Likert scale: These questions typically give participants five to seven opinions to choose from, such as "strongly agree" and "strongly disagree." After the answers have been entered, they are added together to give their survey results an overall score. In some cases, individual Likert scale question results can even be scored across different employee surveys to judge general opinions on subjects. 
• Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS): Similar to the Likert scale, eNPS questions ask employees to answer using a scale of 1 to 10. These questions usually focus on employee opinions of the company, including how likely they are to recommend their job to others.
• Anonymous comments: Allowing space for employees to share their thoughts anonymously can provide deeper insights, such as specific areas of opportunity. Some employee engagement surveys are composed solely of anonymous fill-in-the-blanks. 

Tips on How to Conduct an Employee Engagement Survey

Assembling a dependable employee engagement strategy starts with understanding your employees' needs and motivations. However, before you begin the survey process, you should reassess your goals to craft your survey accordingly.

Use an Online Survey Tool

Many online tools, such as Google Forms, allow you to create unique surveys online and send them to employees individually. Online surveys are significantly easier to work with since they compile answer results for you, saving time and helping you interpret answers more efficiently. 

Most online survey tools send user-specific links, protecting the survey from spam results. These unique links are also beneficial for sending employee-specific surveys.

Avoid Vague and Closed-Ended Answers

As you choose your question content and style, be mindful of how employees may interpret them. For most employee engagement surveys, you're looking for their honest thoughts and opinions rather than the information you already know – or worse, the answers they think you want to hear.

The questions you select should be open-ended, including Likert scale questions that allow employees to agree and disagree to varying levels. Avoid basic-response questions, such as dichotomous and strict multiple-choice questions, and utilize anonymous comments whenever possible. 

Keep Questions Anonymous

Unless your survey contains specifics about individuals or is related to demographics, you should keep employee engagement surveys anonymous. Employees will be more likely to answer feedback and management questions honestly if they know there's no chance of repercussions. Using online survey tools makes it easier to keep results anonymous, as they eliminate handwriting and let employees answer in privacy.

Write Your Own Survey Questions

Most survey question examples online are highly useful and efficient at measuring engagement. That said, they may result in vague answers that don’t truly apply to your unique workplace and employee engagement strategy. Writing a few survey questions yourself can help you make results more company-specific, especially when assessing a particular problem or productivity dip. 

As you phrase your questions, take extra time to ensure they won’t be misinterpreted. Glance over how other engagement questions are written to keep your tone consistent.

How to Interpret Survey Results

When you first receive your survey results, they may seem like incomprehensible numbers. Before jumping to any early conclusions, review the results in their entirety and maintain an open mind. As you go, search for any patterns, such as questions that consistently scored low or had similar scores across departments. The specific conclusions you draw from the results will depend on what you intended to find out from the survey in the first place. 

Consider the following interpretation strategies:

• Put the results in a graph or chart for better visualization
• Create a spreadsheet and analyze results in different styles, such as ranking answers by score
• Review individual answer results
• Compare engagement results to productivity outcomes
• Review and compare scores across departments and other demographics

Resources to Increase Employee Engagement

Amid industry changes and frequent staff turnaround, employee engagement is essential for organizations that want to succeed and retain their team. Solving employee disengagement is easier said than done, and surveying your team is only the first step. Check out iHire's employer resources to learn the next steps to increase employee engagement.