One of the most important things you can do as a business leader is to ensure that your employees remain engaged with their work. This is because having engaged employees leads to better productivity, less absenteeism, lower turnover, and stronger teamwork. Unfortunately, many employees remain unengaged and their organizations suffer as a result. In fact, according to a recent Gallup poll, the correlation of engaged to actively disengaged workers in the U.S. is 2.4:1. This means that for roughly every 2 of your employees that are engaged with their work, there is another that isn’t.
There are several ways you can go about improving employee engagement. But before you can start working on it, you need to know where your current engagement levels stand and the specific causes for the disengagement. To get all the information you need, you can turn to an employee engagement survey. This type of survey asks your employees various questions such as how much they are enjoying their work and what improvements they would make. If you want to get the most out of an employee engagement survey, read on.
Plan Out Your Questions
The first thing you’ll want to do is plan out what questions you want to ask. You need to think carefully about this, as you need to get the most out of each question. If you ask too many questions, your employees may not want to complete it or give each question the time it deserves. On the other hand, if you don’t ask enough questions, you won’t get all the information you need to learn about your employees.
Try to ask only questions that are essential for learning about your employee’s engagement levels. Some great employee survey questions to ask may include:
- Do you feel excited to come to work each day?
- Do you think our organization is invested in your personal success?
- Would you recommend working here to a friend or family member?
- Can you see yourself working here in five years?
- Do you have all the tools you need to accomplish your work?
Choose a Distribution Method
Once you know what you want to ask, the next step is to decide how to ask it. How you distribute your employee engagement survey will depend on a few factors. For example, the best distribution methods will likely differ between a large organization with many remote employees and a small organization that all works within an office together.
One of the easiest ways to send out an employee engagement survey is by creating it online. You can then easily send it out to your employees, regardless of where they are, and track their answers online. However, if you’re only working with a small team, you may find it easier to simply print out the questionnaire and hand it out. The more employees you want to interview, and the more spread out they are, the better it is to have a more automated process.
Encourage Employee Participation
Now that you have your employee engagement survey, the next step is to get responses from your employees. In an ideal world, you’d be able to just send out an email and have a 100 percent response rate before long. However, your employees are busy and answering an engagement survey may not be at the top of their priorities list. Therefore, you need to implement a few strategies to encourage them to respond.
One thing you can do is send out periodic reminders to people who have yet to respond to the survey. Gently reminding them may be all you need to do to get more responses, as some of your employees may have simply forgotten about the survey due to all of their other responsibilities. If you’re still struggling to get responses, consider offering an incentive. For example, you can enter everyone who submits responses into a raffle to win a prize, such as a gift card. Sometimes a small incentive may be enough to get your employees to take that extra five minutes out of their day.
Evaluate Your Responses
After you get your employee engagement survey responses, you need to evaluate the answers. There isn’t much point in having an employee engagement survey if you’re not going to listen to the feedback you’re getting. Go through all of the responses and see if there are any trends that you need to adjust.
For example, let’s say two of your questions are “How excited are you to come to work each day?” and “Do you see yourself working here in five years?”. After analyzing your responses, you discover that your employees are generally excited to come to work but don’t necessarily see themselves working for you in the future. If this were the case, you’d want to analyze why your employees feel this way. They might not like the outlook of the company or feel like there is room for them to advance their careers within the organization. By figuring this out, you can then adjust your organization to better retain your employees.
Adjust the Survey
To get the most from your employee engagement surveys, you’re going to need to conduct more than one. By doing so, you can track responses over time and see how they change. If you make adjustments based on your employees’ responses, you want to know if those changes are working.
But before you go and send out the same survey each time, take the time to see if your survey needs some adjustments. Are you learning valuable information from your questions? Are you getting a high response rate? Is there anything else you want to learn? Make adjustments whenever the need arises to ensure that you’re getting the most from your survey each time you send it out.
Send Out Your Next Employee Engagement Survey Soon
Running an employee engagement survey can take a little time. You need time to not only design the survey, but for your employees to answer it and for you to analyze the responses. Therefore, the sooner you start your employee engagement survey, the sooner you can start implementing changes and seeing results.
Start by planning out the questions you want to ask and determine the best way to deliver these questions to your employees. Then, encourage your employees to respond to the survey and begin to analyze the results. As you gain information, make improvements to your business and adjust the survey for better results going forward. If you can do all of this consistently, you should be able to learn a lot about your employees’ engagement level and make the necessary changes to ensure it remains as high as possible.