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Your employees are responsible for many different things in your organization. Many of them are on the front lines, interacting with customers and they are the face of your brand.
Disengaged employees cost companies more than $550 billion a year in lost productivity and brand perception. The good news is that employees will tell you how to get them more engaged.
You just have to ask them and listen to them. An employee engagement survey is the first step in making that happen. If you want to have a thriving workplace, everyone needs to be on board.
Find out how you can create an employee engagement survey that makes an impact.
1. Know Your Goal of the Survey
The first thing you need to do is figure out what you’re trying to accomplish with your survey. Do you want to know how engaged your employees are? Do you want to know why they’re not engaged?
Maybe you want to open up communication channels with your employees and you’re not sure how to do that.
You have to know what the question is that needs to be answered in your survey. This will dictate the types of questions that you ask.
2. Get Buy-In from the C-Suite
It’s important to have everyone on board with your employee engagement survey. You have to get everyone on the same page as to why you need to do a survey and the purpose of the survey.
Buy-in has to include the upper management of the business, communications department, human resources, and any other stakeholders and managers. If there are many stakeholders, you may need to set up a committee to ensure that everyone’s interests are part of the conversation.
2. Develop Your List of Questions
You’re going to write down a list of questions that you want to ask your employees, which will be the first draft. This is like a brainstorming session where you just get all of your thoughts down on paper.
If you have a committee, you’ll need to get their input and see if they have anything that they need to know. Of course, you have to make sure that their interests are aligned with the purpose of the survey, otherwise, the survey will get off track.
Once you have your questions, narrow them down to the most important ones. Revisit the purpose of your survey and what you’re trying to discover. Only include the survey questions that will help you achieve the goal.
3. Ask Your Questions the Right Way
Your list may include a lot of open-ended questions or they may not be clear. Take your list of survey questions that need to be clear and concise. Each question should only address one concept.
For example, you shouldn’t ask if someone is proud to work for the company and they recommend it. Break this up into two questions, the first asking if they’re proud to work for the company. The second is if they’d recommend it to others.
Open-ended questions are good for some questions, but they make the survey results difficult to measure. You want to stick with multiple-choice questions. You may leave the last question an open-ended question, which gives the employee an opportunity to provide feedback and ideas to improve employee engagement.
4. Creating and Distributing the Survey
Now that your questions are finalized, you can move on to the next step, which is to figure out how you’ll distribute the survey and what kind of form you’ll use. You can use an online platform like 123FormBuilder. You can post the survey on an internal website and have employees fill it out.
You want to make sure that the solution that you use allows employees to remain anonymous, which will be the only way to get the best answers. Otherwise, employees won’t feel comfortable being honest in their surveys.
5. Be Prepared for Honest Answers
The hard part for your management team will be seeing the answers that come with it. Everyone needs to be prepared for honest feedback. That honest feedback can be highly critical of the organization.
It’s important not to look at the criticism as a personal attack. Everyone has to see it as a way to improve the company as a whole.
6. Get Ready to Take Action
Employees want to be engaged in the office. They want to have work that is inspiring and fulfilling. They can’t do that if the morale in the office is so low.
Employees who take the engagement survey will think that it’s just another survey that won’t make a difference. You can prove them wrong by listening to what your employees said, acknowledging it, and then making concrete changes.
If you do a survey with no intention to follow through with any action, you’ll make your employees even more disengaged.
7. Assess Results and Next Steps
Once you get the results of the survey, you and the management team can review the results. You’ll also want to see where the opportunities are to make improvements. Come up with a list of changes that employees want to see based on the survey results.
To make the biggest immediate impact, start making changes by going for quick wins. These are changes that aren’t difficult to do and will yield fast results. It will also send the right message to employees that you’re listening and willing to do something to improve the workplace.
Creating an Employee Engagement Survey That Gets Big Results
Employee engagement can seem like a black hole in your business. You know that there are employees that are disengaged, but you don’t know why and how deep the problem runs.
An employee engagement survey tells you how many employees are disengaged and why. If you design a good survey, then you’ll get ideas as to how you can fix the problem. Your job is to listen and take action when you get the results.
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Interesting related article: “What is Motivation?“