Business leaders, HR, Communications and other departments are likely to have a sense of how its people are feeling about the workplace, their roles and the business. But you can’t rely on how you ‘think’ people are ‘feeling’ and continue to build an engaged workforce, particularly when the benefits are well known – increased productivity, improved retention and a thriving culture to name but a few.
You need employees to tell you how they feel, so you have authentic, tangible, data that offers insight into how enthusiastic, motivated, connected and informed employees really feel with the business. And an Employee Engagement survey will give you just that.
Understanding how your employees are feeling with positive and negative insights will help you understand the picture today and make informed decisions to build a better tomorrow and keep enhancing your EVP. Running surveys sequentially (perhaps bi-annually or annually) also allows you to track changes over time and analyse how any challenges are evolving and if any new challenges arise.
Set your employee engagement survey strategy
Surveys should be embraced by employees by giving them a safe platform to express their thoughts, feelings and concerns. However, their length, frequency, repetitiveness, completion timeframe and concern of ‘not being listened to’ with tangible actions can lead to survey fatigue – so a robust survey strategy needs to be created that agrees all of these factors.
Typically, there are two approaches to employee engagement surveys:
- An annual survey, across a range of focus areas throughout the business (e.g. culture and policies through to leadership). Typically, these are longer in length and can take up to 30 minutes to complete.
- A Pulse survey, which typically focuses on a specific area. These are higher frequency (they can be monthly, bi-monthly, quarterly or bi-yearly) and take around 5 minutes to complete.
A combination of the two dovetail perfectly. The annual survey offers insights for important, long-term strategic planning and the agility of Pulse surveys help to keep things on track within a specific focus area.
Writing an employee engagement survey
Correctly writing the survey is the cornerstone of understanding employee engagement. The starting point is to set clear objectives so the data gives you insights into the areas you want to focus on.
Typically surveys will focus on these areas and may weigh questions more heavily in some areas over others, depending on the objectives:
- Leadership and management: Effectiveness, transparency and accessibility across the business
- Communication and transparency: Frequency, content and channels of communication
- Career development and growth: Training and career advancement opportunities
- Workplace environment and culture: Day-to-day atmosphere, team dynamics and sense of belonging
- Wellbeing: Mental health, work-life balance and job satisfaction
- Recognition and rewards: Well valued and rewarded for their contribution
Additionally, it’s important to capture employee demographics in the response – for example, countries for a global organisation and departments – allowing for company-wide and sub-group data analysis to understand if there are any challenges related to specific areas of the business – e.g. well-being challenges limited to one country only.
The survey should be clear, structured into specific sections based on your focus areas and capture a mixture of quantitative and qualitative data – questions on sliding scales ( 1-5), multiple choice answers and free-text boxes will help achieve this.
Prepare your employees
Not all employees will feel the same about a survey – some will enjoy the opportunity to share their thoughts, whereas others may see it as an ‘addition’ to their already busy roles. So preparing employees is key and below are three important steps:
Communication: Warm up employees by letting them know that the survey is coming in advance, the date it will go-live and how long it’s live for. Be sure to explain why their opinion will help shape the business.
Test: Once the survey is written, the opportunity to test it with a select group of employees to further refine the survey in line with their feedback so it’s clear, easy to understand and user-friendly.
Survey launch: Always avoid launching during a peak time period (e.g. just before Christmas) or traditional vacation times (e.g. school holidays).
Employee engagement survey analysis
Depending on your survey platform, you may be able to track data whilst the survey is live for indicative results, but as soon as it’s reached its completion date you can start the analysis to understand the status quo and plan for actionable change with the following steps:
- Data organisation: Export the data into a manageable format like a spreadsheet, so its captured in one place
- Data cleanse: Check for incomplete, invalid or duplicate responses and remove these from your data
- Calculate quantitative scores and benchmark: Calculate the mean scores and compare these against previous survey scores (if available) and industry averages. Keep an eye out for nuances – if 50% strongly agree and 50% strongly disagree. This can signal polarising questions or further digging to understand the split
- Identify universal trends across the business and further analyse demographic segments to spot consistencies and nuances – for example, are employees positive about the workplace culture, except for a certain department
- Identify qualitative themes from all responses. For example, if ‘better communications’ keeps occurring. It can help to categorise themes into positive, negative and neutral
- Evaluate and report: Traditional evaluation metrics are employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS), engagement index scores, scores via category (for example, leadership and communication) and overall response rate.
blue goose has supported clients with employee engagement for over 20 years and you can read some of our highlights in our case studies.
If you want to talk to us about your employee engagement or wider communication challenges, please contact us here.
