For many years now, employee engagement has been a top priority for most organisations. When employees are highly engaged, they’re more empowered, accountable, and productive in their roles. To understand the degree to which employees are engaged, many organisations conduct employee engagement surveys. Insights from these surveys can help them to shape employee policies and practices in ways that result in boosted engagement.
The truth is everyone inside an organisation plays an integral role in engagement. But not everyone is engaged or motivated in the same way. Measuring employee engagement helps you gain insight into employee opinions about organisational successes and opportunities for improvement. Leveraging key drivers of engagement allows you to simplify your focus. Employee engagement surveys look at how connected employees are to their work, to their team and to their organisation.
Developing an effective employee engagement survey can be a daunting task. Though some may assume it’s as easy as putting together a few questions and sending them out to your employees to answer, creating an employee engagement survey that will bring value to your organisation requires a detailed project plan—just like any other business initiative. And that takes time and effort.
As with any other project, you should begin with the end goal in mind. The goal of a good employee engagement survey should be to help your organisation identify and build upon its strengths so that you can ultimately find a competitive edge within your respective industry. Engaged employees are proven to perform better and deliver better results, so you want to measure their current engagement levels and gather employee input on what would help boost engagement at your organisation.
Arriving at this valuable data takes time. Below is a step-by-step process you can follow to create an employee engagement survey that adds value to your organisation.
Begin by creating a baseline to help track progress and the success of your future employee engagement strategies. This means asking employees for their honest feedback on how things are currently going. While it may seem uncomfortable to solicit potential criticism, doing so will create an open line of communication and ultimately help you change your company culture for the better.
In order for any real change to occur in your organisation, you’ll need the support of your senior leaders. Involve them in the process during the planning phase so you can identify survey objectives together. This way, they will have a vested interest in taking action based on the results your survey will gather.
You can’t measure everything. And you can’t fix everything at once. So, this is the time to be discerning. Identify high-priority objectives, focusing especially on areas where productivity is currently dropping.
Being open and honest with your employees from the get-go will help you gather better data in the end. Make sure they understand the what, why, when and how of the survey process. A lack of details could lead to mistrust, and that’s not the environment you want to create before you ask your employees for their honest opinion of how your company is currently operating.
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As we said before, transparency is key when conducting an employee engagement survey. Once the results have been tabulated and interpreted, share them with your employees. The best way to do so is in smaller meetings where the leaders in your organisation discuss the results with their direct reports so they feel included in the process.
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Now that you have your data, it’s time to start making changes. Compare your results to your objectives and set goals for how you want to improve in terms of engagement and business success. From there, you’ll strategise and begin putting programs in place to reach those goals.
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