What are employee engagement surveys?
Employee or staff engagement is the degree to which an organization’s employees consider appreciated and included in their daily work. Employee engagement surveys provide insights into what is driving or hampering staff engagement levels in your organization. These surveys help you understand what factors contribute to employee dissatisfaction and attrition and how they can be addressed.
Why conduct employee engagement surveys?
Conducting employee engagement surveys are essential for any organization, big or small. They let you know if the employees are engaged, satisfied with their work, responsibilities, teams, managers, etc. Engagement levels need to be closely monitored, and surveys are the best way to do it.
Here are the key purposes of conducting employee engagement surveys?
- Provide a medium to your staff to voice their opinions, concerns, and suggestions
- Let supervisors measure staff engagement levels and take necessary actions to keep them high
- Elevate staff engagement levels if they are low
- Get data and sense of direction to improving your employee initiatives and organizational operations
Key benefits of conducting staff engagement surveys
- Foster a work culture of motivation, pride, and commitment
- Understand employee attrition factors. Work towards staff retention
- Understand your standing concerning other organizations
- Align team goals with the organization’s goals, vision, and mission
- Educating and empowering employees to create a better place to work
It all starts with communicating about your employee engagement surveys to the staff. What will you be doing exactly? How often? Informing and educating your employees about surveys you will be running is essential.
Communicating the purpose of conducting staff engagement surveys
1. What will you measure?
Employees may not be on the same page when it comes to understanding what employee engagement is and means to the organization. Help your staff understand what is and what you will measure precisely. This will aid your efforts in gathering honest and candid feedback from your employees.
2. What are the expectations of your staff?
The most critical expectations from your employees are to respond to the surveys and answer them honestly. Be entirely honest about employee expectations, what seems to be working, what could be done better, etc. Qualitative feedback from employees will help the organization gather data to improve employee initiatives.
3. What will the surveys help achieve?
You need to let your staff know what measuring staff engagement will help the organization do. Let your employees know what the study aims to achieve and what the data will mean for the HR team, leadership, and employees.
4. What should employees expect?
The leadership team, HR managers, and supervisors will analyze the survey data and take necessary actions based on staff feedback. It would help if you let employees know the key findings, what steps are being taken to alleviate staff concerns, boost employee engagement, and all future actions and initiatives.
5. How will you ensure confidentiality?
Employee surveys have to be anonymous, and you need to ensure employees believe that. If your employees cannot trust you on anonymity and confidentiality, they will not be honest about their feedback. You will not be able to change or improve anything without that.
6. What sort of actions will follow?
Let your employees know what initiatives are being undertaken after survey completions. Solicit their feedback, have them participate in processes for best results. Your employees will appreciate it and positively affect their intent to stay.
Employee engagement survey communication framework
Pre-questionnaire announcements
It would help if you let all the employees know before you launch the survey what’s expected of them, the deadline, etc. You can alert your employees in one of the two commonly used ways.
1. Organization-wide
This could be a company-wide email or an announcement. You need to include all necessary details such as respondents’ eligibility, deadline, access to survey data, survey invite, etc. If you are using a staff experience survey management tool such as QuestionPro Workforce, then you have a ton of options. You can customize your surveys, invites, schedule reminders, segment data, assign role-based access, etc.
2. Supervisor level
Ideally, this would come for team managers and function supervisors and be addressed to team members and team leaders. This is crucial to ensure all teams participate in the surveys for maximum success. When letting teams know, supervisors should:
– Talk about their role and involvement in the process
– Why every employee must participate
– Benefits of answering these surveys
Day of the survey
The survey’s day is very crucial, most organizations do not send reminders, but we think it’s necessary. We think you should do both online and offline reminders. You can send out an email alerting them to the deadline and why their feedback is so important. If you are using an employee experience platform such as QuestionPro Workforce, you can set reminders via the app too. The software or tool also lets you customize the reminders.
You can set up offline reminders by way of physical reminders such as posters in the cafeteria or the bulletin board. You can print out physical invites or put small notes on the desks of the employees.
Post-questionnaire announcements
After you close your employee engagement surveys, thank them for their feedback. It is always a good idea to share some high-level insights with the team. They feel involved and lets them know what’s going to happen next. You can inform your employees all at once or followed a hierarchical model, which basically means:
All-hands: Showcase the study to all employees together
Leadership team: Present the management team with results along with industry benchmarks
Supervisors: Disseminate the results to managers and gather feedback from them and their subordinates
