What is an employee engagement survey?

Any business looking to improve customer satisfaction and increase profit must start at the source, which is employee engagement. Studies have shown that companies with high employee engagement have 89% more customer satisfaction and 50% more customer loyalty. These companies also have a 41% less absenteeism rate. 

 

As a business owner, you’d want to know your company’s employee engagement level, their satisfaction, happiness, attitude towards work, and their take on the office work culture— this is where an employee engagement survey comes in. 

 

An employee engagement survey is a series of questionnaires administered to employees to gather quantitative and qualitative data highlighting their engagement drive, source of motivation, and potential pain points. 

 

Whether you’ve carried out an employee engagement survey in the past or are looking to incorporate this strategy into your business, this article contains what you need to get started. 

 

Why conduct an employee engagement survey?

Before considering the importance of conducting an employee engagement survey, let’s talk about employee engagement, one of the conversations taking the Human Resources industry by storm. 

 

Employee engagement is the extent to which an employee invests their physical, emotional, and cognitive efforts towards the company's goals. It is simply the level of dedication and enthusiasm employees put into work. 

 

So how does the employee engagement level of a company affect the overall health of the business? 

 

In a Forbes article, Vineet Nayar, CEO of HCL Technologies, explained the concept of “employee first, customer second” as the key to business growth instead of the 

conventional “customer first” strategy.

 

He explained that companies that rely on the second strategy end up not delivering as promised most of the time. However, businesses that run on the first model end up increasing their customer satisfaction by first producing happy and productive employees. 

 

The importance of measuring employee engagement in your business is innumerable, but here are a few: 

 

It Holds The Leadership Accountable 

Every employee is accountable to someone irrespective of their position. However, the guys at the top have no one to hold them accountable save their conscience and perhaps a pulse survey. As a business owner, you’d want to have a system that puts you in check and helps you remain consistent in your goals, vision, and intentions. An employee engagement survey lets you find lapses and change policies that incite them. 

 

It Encourages Data-Driven Decision-Making 

Gone are the days when business decisions are made on guesswork and sentiments. With the data derived from your engagement surveys, you can make meaningful changes to your business with the certainty of a positive result. 

 

It Shapes Company’s Work Culture 

A workplace survey can help you discover the flaws in the company’s work culture and how to fix them. You must know that employees need to change with time, and the work culture needs to be able to accommodate some of these changes— this is where a survey becomes handy. Using this method, you can get crucial information directly from the most affected individuals. 

 

What exactly does it mean to measure employee engagement?

An employee engagement survey is used to gauge employee engagement between employees and the workplace. The major aim of conducting a survey is to get valuable data that will be used to drive change. 

 

A survey usually starts with a problem and then finds the root cause of the problem and the factors that amplify these problems. 

 

Let’s say that the employees in the customer support unit of your business are less productive than they have ever been. A personalized employee engagement survey on these frontline workers could identify burnout as the cause of the problem. Then with more questionnaires, it can highlight the increase in clients and lack of extra hands in the department as the root cause of the problem. It could also reveal the little support from the management as one of the factors amplifying the problem. 

 

Here are some examples of questions to ask in an employee engagement survey: 

 

Open survey questions 

• Do you have a clear understanding of the company’s goals? Please explain. 
• How motivated are you to be successful in your role? Please explain. 
• Do you feel like your skills are being used to their total capacity? Please explain. 

 

On a scale of 1 to 10 

• On a scale of 1 to 10, describe how well you understand the company’s goals. 
• On a scale of 1 to 10, how well do you think your suggestions are considered? 
• Describe how motivated you are to be successful in your role on a scale of 1 to 10. 

 

5-answer Likert questions 

Describe your response: Very satisfied, Satisfied, Neither satisfied nor dissatisfied, Dissatisfied, and Very dissatisfied.

 

• I understand the company’s goals. 
• I feel motivated to succeed in my role. 
• I have everything I need to be successful in my job. 

 

Steps to implement an employee engagement survey

To successfully measure employee engagement in a company, you’d have to create a plan to help you conduct this survey and implement the results. 

 

Here is a three-step plan to help you effectively measure employee engagement. 

 

Creating an action plan

Before conducting a survey, the first step is to write out the goals you look to achieve at the end of the day. In this case, it is to measure employee engagement. Your goal could also be to improve customer experience by first gauging and improving the engagement of the employees. Whatever the case may be, knowing your goals helps you choose the most suitable approach for the survey. 

 

Facilitate the process with the right employee engagement survey software

Now that you know you have highlighted the goals for your survey, the next step is to execute the survey with the right tool. You can carry out employee engagement surveys with anything from a simple online questionnaire to robust survey software that provides valuable insights about your workplace engagement. Compared to coming up with a bunch of questions, a survey tool helps you determine employees’ pain points and their causes using machine learning. 

 

Measure employee engagement results and take action

The most crucial aspect of any survey is the implementation stage. If the outcome of your survey reveals that your employees are less engaged at work due to certain factors, the next step is to go back to the drawing board and adjust them. 

 

Conclusion 

There is no perfect company culture, but there are great ones. The first step towards becoming a business with active, productive, and well-engaged employees is prioritizing employees’ well-being by finding out what they need to be better through frequent surveys.