What is employee engagement?

When you are preparing to create an employee engagement survey, it is useful to first consider what employee engagement is. This can help you to measure metrics better, as you will have some criteria by which to judge your employee responses. Employee engagement encompasses a broad range of metrics. A few to measure and look out for include:

• Happiness
• Retention
• Performance
• Absenteeism
• Satisfaction with workload
• Work-life balance
• Productivity
• Career progression.

You might want to look at employee engagement alongside workplace performance, in order to figure out why some employees are more productive than others. 

Next, let’s walk through the key steps in creating and using an employee engagement survey.

1. Working out the content and structure of your employee engagement survey

It is helpful to think about building your survey in a way that makes it easy to collect data in an organised manner. You might look at creating a scale system for responses to questions, such as asking a candidate to provide a response from one (meaning ‘strongly disagree’) to five (meaning ‘strongly agree’). 

It is useful to format your survey in a way that is clear and easy for your employees to understand. Try to keep questions simple and refrain from using overly complex language.

That way, they are more likely to be able to respond accurately and truthfully (rather than simply guessing a response). At the end of the day, an employee engagement survey provides something of a voice for your employees regarding their needs.

All of your questions should ideally be aimed at answering the objective of the survey, which might be simply to measure employee engagement. In this case, try to avoid adding tangential questions that are not relevant to that topic. To stay focused, it is worth creating a list of specific employee engagement metrics that you want to bear in mind. 

However, if you are including employee engagement questions in a more general employee experience survey, you might choose to only include about three to five questions regarding the topic. You might also want to have a deadline in mind for submissions.

Pulse surveys

Some employers choose to use what is known as a pulse survey for quicker, more immediate responses from their employees. These can give you a snapshot of how an employee is feeling at a particular moment. Pulse surveys can help keep your data relevant, and they are easier for employees to respond to frequently than a longer survey.

2. Hold a meeting with team leaders and other senior management

Before brainstorming questions for employee engagement, it might be worth talking to your other team leaders and senior management staff to gain their opinion on what matters. They might all have their own unique concerns regarding their team that can be answered with the help of an employee engagement survey. Once you have collated their responses, you can start to look at building your questions.  

3. Creating employee engagement survey questions

Your employee engagement survey questions should ideally be very clear, logical and not show any bias towards one particular response.

How many questions you include is up to you, but it is worth bearing in mind the amount of time that each employee has to answer a survey. You could provide the option of a more detailed response for employees who wish to provide this. 

It is worth thinking about how much feedback you are looking to gain from your employees. You might choose to work with a scaled response system ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree. Or you might choose ‘yes or no’ questions on employee engagement for a more quick and simple response. Or, you might want your employees to provide more detailed feedback, explaining their reasoning. 

Examples

It is important to feel that you are asking questions that are meaningful for your business, such as its strengths and weaknesses.

The below employee engagement sample statements involve the employee responding with how much they agree with the statement:

• I enjoy coming to work every day
• I am satisfied with my current benefits/perks package
• I am satisfied with the career progression possibilities available to me
• I am proud to work for my organisation
• I enjoy working with my colleagues
• I feel that my manager cares about my achievements
• I feel that the leadership of the company is invested in my own personal growth.

How you format your questions, however, will depend on the depth and quality of the response that you are hoping to gain from your employees.

If you are looking for a more detailed response, it might be more appropriate to have a slightly more complex question for them to answer. You can choose to have a mix of open-ended and closed questions.

4. Building a mailing list of relevant employees

Before sending out an employee engagement survey, it is worth considering building a list of employees who you think it is relevant to contact via email about it. You might deem it necessary to send the survey out to all members of your team, however. 

5. Using a survey creation tool to format your survey

In order to gather feedback with more ease, it is worth building your survey using an online survey tool. They can help you to organise your data in a more efficient way. Some may also have data analytics tools for when you need to start analysing the data. It might be at this point that you decide whether your survey should be anonymous or not. 

A survey that reveals its respondents might help give you a better indication of an individual employee’s needs, rather than the general needs of your whole team or department. However, some employees might answer more truthfully or openly if they know that their response is anonymous. 

6. Sending the survey out to employees

Once your employee engagement survey is ready to go, you can start sending it out to your employees. You might do this using an email campaign tool, which helps you to track other metrics, such as how many employees have opened your email.

7. Collecting and analysing the data

Once you have received enough responses from your employees or have met your deadline for responses, you can start analysing the data. To do so, you might want to enlist the help of a people analytics or data analytics specialist. They can help read and interpret the data so that you know what actions to take on the basis of this knowledge. This transformed raw data can finally become useful insights that can aid your strategy. 

Measuring survey questions

There are several kinds of scale that you can use to measure survey question responses. These are nominal, ordinal, ratio and interval scales. The type of scale you use will depend on the kind of response that you have requested from your employees. 

If you are gathering data that offers a limited choice of options from which your employee has to pick, this is measured according to a nominal scale.

However, if you can assign a numerical ranking to each response according to an order of different values, this data is measured according to an ordinal scale. Interval scales take into consideration numerical ranking, but also the difference between each given value. 

Finally, a ratio scale is used when the data you are collecting has a zero point which is a value in itself, rather than a lack of – think of how zero in Celsius is a value, for example, rather than whether something is hot or cold. 

8. Using the data to aid your employee engagement strategy

Once you have collected the data, organised it and analysed it, you can start to build real-world solutions to issues with employee engagement. If your employees have shown you that there are obvious weak points, such as in their career progression or perks package, you can now look into creating a strategy to improve them.