Employee Engagement Surveys

Engagement surveys provide insight to senior leaders about the issues that are most important to their organisation. A well-designed survey gives employees a voice to express their concerns and feedback that might otherwise go unheard.

Asking the right questions can guide your people strategy and identify new perspectives. Asking consistent questions over time is an opportunity to compare culture and change. Asking different questions is an opportunity to explore new issues.

Dashboards and reports help summarise the main points to senior leaders, decision-makers and line managers. Other dashboards can provide feedback to the whole organisation.

Engagement surveys are an opportunity to listen to employees, capture their opinions on the most important issues, and drive organisational improvement.

Below are some of the most important goals of staff engagement surveys.

1. Measure progress towards organisation goals

Some organisation goals, for example improving diversity, can be measured directly from existing HRIS extracts.

Engagement surveys excel when asking questions that uncover new insights that aren't readily available from existing data sources. Employee motivation, commitment and challenges questions provide useful insights that will ultimately drive better performance.

2. Improve employee wellbeing

Regular employee conversations are essential to improving wellbeing across an organisation. Including questions about employee wellbeing, such as their mental health and interpersonal relationships, can provide access to information that is difficult to gather.

Some of the most valuable wellbeing data can only be captured by asking direct questions. Organisation surveys are a great opportunity to ask all employees a standard set of questions in a non-confrontational manner.

Improving employee wellbeing with data

3. Identify differences between groups of employees

A well-designed set of questions will measure key metrics across the whole organisation. Questions such as employee confidence in their abilities, levels of acceptance, feelings of equality etc. are all insightful as a whole.

More in-depth insight, and findings that generate suggested actions, come from comparing different groups of people. For example, some locations may be underperforming; managers might be more committed than more junior employees; employees in teams might have higher levels of stress than reported on average.

Surveys that lead to actions with outcomes measured in future surveys will help drive meaningful change and improvement.

Annual surveys are great. Detailed surveys provide lots of information and lots of insight. Regular surveys provide a useful baseline to compare trends to see improvements (or opportunities) over time.

Pulse surveys are great too. Shorter surveys are a chance to ask questions more frequently or to more specific groups of people.

In-depth engagement surveys

• Ability to compare see trends and patterns changing over time.
• Gather lots of feedback on a range of topics.
• More effort to create, complete and analyse.
• Less frequent, so longer to wait for the results.

Pulse surveys

• Near real-time feedback on specific topics.
• Lots of data for comparisons and trend analysis.
• Employee fatigue can lead to lower response rates or less honest answers.
• Requires good automation and software tools to keep admin and reporting to a reasonable level.