Employee engagement is a make or break to any company’s success. When employee engagement levels are high, organizations experience higher profitability, lower absenteeism, stronger employee retention, and a whole host of other benefits that make a positive impact on your organization’s bottom line.
So how do you get a read on employee engagement? One of the best things you can do is ensure that surveys are part of your employee engagement strategy.
There is an art to designing this type of survey. To get accurate results, you need to develop a thoughtful set of employee engagement survey questions designed to uncover what employees are thinking and feeling. We’ll show you how to do that — and how to analyze the results of your surveys so that you can drive meaningful change within your organization.
Organizations that use employee engagement survey questions well can foster open communication and better relationships between employees and leadership. Structure your employee engagement survey questions well, and you’ll gain a direct line of insight into your employees’ needs, challenges, and overall satisfaction.
A well-designed employee engagement survey can:
On the flip side, ineffective surveys, which typically feature vague, leading, or overly complex questions, can result in skewed data that causes leadership to make misinformed decisions.
It takes some thought and a little bit of know-how to create survey questions that will deliver accurate data. Below, we’ll show you some guiding principles to follow, examples of good survey questions, and examples of bad survey questions (plus how to transform bad questions into good ones).
Ready to start designing questions for your employee engagement surveys? Before you get started, read through the following points so that you can apply them to create a great set of questions:
Now that you have some insights into how to craft effective employee engagement survey questions, let’s look at specific examples.
These questions are designed to help you measure employee engagement and get a sense of overall employee satisfaction.
Try questions like these to gauge employee perceptions of supervisors and leadership:
These questions should help you better understand your company’s workplace culture and whether your organization provides a positive or negative employee experience:
Offering career growth and professional development opportunities is huge. In fact, a recent Gartner report found that employee engagement increases by 61%, and their likelihood to be a high performer goes up by 39% when they feel that their organization is offering support through growth opportunities. To measure how satisfied your employees are with professional growth and development opportunities, ask questions like:
Since it’s sometimes difficult to tell the difference between a good survey question and a bad one, we’ll provide a few examples of questions to avoid.
These questions imply a desired answer, which can skew results among respondents who are tempted to agree. Here are a couple of examples:
Both examples are worded so that employees may feel pressured to agree. Instead, try questions like:
These are questions about two different things at once. Here’s two examples:
Keep questions focused on a single topic. The first example should be broken into two separate questions — one about communication and another about employee well-being.
In the second example, the topics are related — but only because they both ask questions about the HR department. This should also be broken into two separate questions, one about responsiveness and another about assistance with benefits questions.
Questions framed negatively can lead to biased results. Here’s an example of what not to do:
In the above example, employees might be tempted to go on the defensive. Instead of providing an honest answer, they’re likely to hedge and provide a “safe” answer — despite assurances of anonymity. Instead, try framing questions in a more positive light, like this:
The biggest reason to conduct employee satisfaction surveys is to collect actionable data — but if your questions are too broad or overly vague, it quickly becomes impossible to zero in on specific issues that need attention. Consider the following example:
It’s a simple, easy to understand question — and it’s also one that most employees could probably write many thousands of words about. What part of the job? Their tasks? Their coworkers? Their supervisors? Their compensation? The list goes on. It’s better get employee feedback through specific questions, like:
Designing a survey with insightful questions is just the first step. The real value of these questionnaires is in analyzing and interpreting the results and then using those results to drive continuous improvement. We’ll show you how to do that next.
The most efficient way to design employee engagement surveys and analyze their results is through an employee experience platform like RapidBee. Our platform gives you the tools to build customized survey templates so that you can create engagement surveys, pulse surveys, exit interviews, and more.
From there, you can send surveys and gather results on the platform. Through RapidBee’s dashboard, you can easily view trends and insights through high-level analytics or dive into individual survey responses to see what employees are saying.
A detailed analysis of your survey results will require several steps. To get the most from the data you’ve collected, do the following:
You can think of the survey analysis process kind of like a one-two punch: First comes the analysis itself, and then you’ll need to follow through with action. To drive improvements in employee engagement, follow these steps:
Employee engagement surveys are all about asking the right questions. When you can design employee engagement survey questions that uncover what employees are really thinking and feeling, you can create a better environment that leads to more engaged employees and improved business outcomes. However, great questions are only half the battle. You’ll need to do a detailed analysis of the results so that you can implement initiatives to improve engagement levels over time.
Through it all, the RapidBee platform can help you. We make it easy to create surveys, gather results, and analyze data — all in one place. If you’d like to learn more about what our platform can do, request a demo.