How to run effective employee engagement surveys
Everybody talks about employee engagement, but as a new business owner it may be something you’ve never had to consider before. After all, how do you know if your own team is engaged or not?
If someone in your team is disengaged, they’re unlikely to care about you, the brand/product, their performance, their results, or their colleagues — and that negative feeling can spread and be picked up by other people across the company. Engaged employees are proactive, positive, and productive, but disengaged employees are the opposite.
To put it bluntly, you cannot afford to have disengaged employees at your business.
We've been running employee engagement surveys for years at Charlie, and believe they contribute significantly to our high retention rate and the fact we regularly see people returning to work for us (often referred to as ‘boomerang employees’).
But you can’t just run employee surveys and hope for the best — you’ve got to act on what your team is telling you.
We keep track of our scores and use the insights from the employee engagement surveys to make better decisions and improve what we do, what we offer, and how we communicate. It’s this follow-on action that helps us hold on to the people who make Charlie what it is, and attract others into the fold (both new and returning).
Employee engagement surveys are a big part of my role, so I’m going to share everything I know about them in this blog — including five easy-to-follow steps to get them up and running at your own business asap. Let’s get started…
What are employee engagement surveys?
Employee engagement surveys are questionnaires that are regularly sent out to better understand how members of a team feel about their work, their role, and the company.
Employee surveys enable you to measure how engaged your team is through a series of questions and ratings, and you can then use this feedback to make decisions, assess your processes, or create new HR policies.
If you run them regularly, employee surveys provide engagement metrics that allow you to identify your team's needs through concrete data.
The risks of not running employee surveys
With one to one meetings and performance reviews, you may feel that you have enough mechanisms in place for employee feedback. But the truth is that not everyone in your team will be comfortable sharing their honest thoughts this way — and this could be for all sorts of reasons: lack of confidence, managerial relationships, preferred communication method etc.
What’s more, meetings like one to ones are focused on the individual so they’re not as likely to garner feedback about big picture stuff like company culture and decision making. And because their focus is on the individual, the feedback is reviewed in isolation. Collective feedback through employee engagement surveys enables you to spot trends and patterns across an entire team.
If you fail to run regular employee surveys then it’s likely that you’ll risk the following:
A lack of visibility
Employee engagement surveys bring things out into the open that you may not otherwise be aware of. This is because your team is more likely to give you honest feedback through anonymous employee surveys than through other communication channels.
Rash decisions on important HR policies
Without regular feedback from the people who work for you, you run the risk of making the wrong decisions. You can tailor the questions in employee surveys so that you’re generating responses about what you need to know about — for example, if you’re thinking about updating your flexible working policy then you can ask for their thoughts around flexible working before making any changes.
Gut feeling
Making decisions based on gut feeling can sometimes be a good thing in business, but when it comes to the needs of your team you have to take their thoughts and feelings into account. If you don’t regularly ask for these via employee engagement surveys then you’ll make decisions based on your feelings and not theirs.
People not feeling taken care of or listened to
Employee surveys send a message to your team that you value their opinion and care about what they think. You’re also providing your employees with an accessible way of sharing more difficult feedback, which helps to prevent negative feelings growing into bigger problems.
Listening to your team will also make your own job easier, especially when you have to make more difficult decisions, as you’ll be able to demonstrate that you’ve included them in your decision making process.
Frustration from the team
A team that feels like an afterthought is going to be frustrated. Employee engagement surveys do a lot to prevent this, as your team is regularly reminded that you want to know what they think.
Why employee engagement surveys are not just a nice-to-have
Employee engagement surveys are a great tool for collecting insights about your business and improving your HR policies. Consistently running employee surveys will help you to:
- Understand how effective your HR policies are
- Generate honest feedback
- Focus on particular areas and departments
- Get an overall picture of your business (by comparing results from different years or quarters)
- Make your team feel involved in decision making.
Involved employees are engaged employees. So if you make employee surveys a regular thing, you’ll also witness:
- More motivation
- Higher levels of productivity
- A deeper commitment (to their work and to the company).
This can become something of a virtuous cycle — the happier someone is at work, the more they want to invest, and the more engaged they become, the less likely they will want to leave.
We’ve seen this ourselves at Charlie. We have a very high retention rate and a history of people returning to work for us (boomerang employees), and we consistently run regular employee engagement surveys. As a small business, these surveys have made a big difference.
To put it simply, highly engaged employees tend to work harder, deliver better results and stay with a company for longer. People with high engagement also tend to be happier in general and report better levels of personal wellbeing.
What metrics can you measure with employee engagement surveys?
You can use employee surveys to measure many aspects of your business, but these are the most common types of questions and topics:
- Work/life balance
- Communication (within a team and company-wide)
- Motivation (in their role and with the tools given to them) - see our employee motivation survey blog for more information
- Benefits and salaries
- Career development
- Training opportunities
- Relationship with managers
- Collaboration (within a team and company-wide)
- Leadership
- DE&I
- Changes and updates within the business.
5 steps to run regular employee engagement surveys at your business
1- Define what you’re measuring with employee surveys
Employee engagement is very wide-ranging, so think about why you’re running employee engagement surveys before you do anything else.
As a small business owner, it’s likely that you have a few ideas about what your company does well and what it could improve on. If anything immediately springs to mind, it’s probably worth digging a little deeper.
Maybe your company is lacking in development opportunities? Or your team feels that decision-making is too opaque? Unless you ask, you'll never know.
Knowing what to ask in your employee surveys is easier if you use an engagement survey tool like CharlieHR, as it comes with in-built templates tailored specifically to generate insights into specific areas.
Each template has a pre-populated list of questions, and you can choose from a range of topics, including:
- Employee wellbeing
- Employee motivation
- Teamwork and efficiency
- Leadership
- Growth and development
- Remote working.
With a tool like Charlie, all you need to do is pick a template and the system automatically sends the questionnaire to your employees and collects their responses. Start a free trial today to find out more.
2. Choose the right questions for your employee engagement surveys
Once you know what area you’re going to focus on with your employee surveys, you need to pick the right questions:
- Closed-ended questions are better when the information you want is binary in nature: yes or no; better or worse; more or less.
- Open-ended questions are more useful when trying to draw out information that is more complex, or if you’re trying to find inspiration for future changes to the way you work.
- And rating-scale questions (maybe using the Likert scale like we do at Charlie) allow you to measure the extent team members agree with a statement.
We also recommend that you:
- Keep your employee engagement surveys snappy – the longer the survey takes to fill out, the less likely your team is to complete it
- Be wary of your own bias - your objective is to elicit honest feedback from your team, so be careful how you phrase your questions.
For examples of good questions for employee engagement surveys, check out our free employee engagement survey template.
3. Make your employee surveys anonymous
A lot of free tools for employee engagement surveys don’t guarantee anonymity and this can be problematic.
If you want your employee surveys to generate genuine feedback, you need to guarantee that all responses are anonymous. Then your team will feel much more able to say what they really think.
If you use a tool like Charlie, all data is anonymised — so you can analyse all feedback while still protecting your employees’ rights.
4. Launch your employee engagement surveys at the right time
Traditionally speaking, many businesses have opted to run employee surveys once a year, but it’s now popular to send them out far more regularly. Only asking for feedback once a year is too infrequent to drive business success.
Progressive companies lean towards 'pulse’ surveys, which are shorter, more regular employee engagement surveys designed to give you a snapshot of what's happening inside your business.
You can schedule these employee surveys to run automatically at regular intervals — once every quarter, for example.
5. Choose the right provider for your employee surveys
It’s not easy to design employee engagement surveys from scratch. So unless you have a specific topic you need to dig into, it’s usually faster and more insightful to use a survey built by experts.
When it comes to choosing the right provider, you want to find the best fit for your company — there is no ‘best one’, but there will be a best one for you.
SurveyMonkey
The most well known employee surveys provider, SurveyMonkey is a highly-specialised survey tool that’s best suited to large companies with a dedicated HR team.
This powerful platform gives you access to advanced features like A/B testing and branching logic, but it can take some getting used to. So it’s a good idea to understand how employee engagement surveys work before giving SurveyMonkey a try.
Google Forms
Google Forms is free if you have a Google account and is great for collecting basic information.
But as it’s not actually designed for HR, it’s missing certain features (like a question bank or any means of analysing results).
CharlieHR
We’ve built employee surveys into Charlie in the form of Polls.
With Polls, you can choose from a bank of ready-made employee engagement surveys, track survey completion, and analyse results from the user-friendly dashboard.
6. Make your employee engagement surveys personal
Specialised engagement tools are great for learning more about your team, but they aren't your only options. Sometimes, a more casual and collaborative approach is more effective — which is where focus groups come into play.
Focus groups allow you to discuss issues with your team in an informal setting, so they’re great for digging into the employee experience without predefined employee surveys questions.
Focus groups can also be an effective way of overcoming poor participation and response rates — all you need to do is get them in the room.
7. Act on the results of your employee surveys
To actually make a difference to employee engagement, you have to follow through on the results of your employee engagement surveys.
The best idea is to share the results of your employee surveys with your senior leadership team and come up with an action plan — you're going to need their help in implementing any significant changes to company policies, after all.
To help you with this, platforms like Charlie come with built-in analysis and reporting.
Employee engagement surveys FAQs
What’s the difference between employee engagement and employee enablement?
Employee engagement refers to the emotional connection, commitment and enthusiasm your employees have towards their work and the company they work for.
Employee enablement, on the other hand, is about giving people the resources, tools and autonomy to do their jobs well, empowering them to make decisions and take ownership.
If you see employee engagement as the emotional end goal, then enablement is about giving your team the practical support to experience it.
Do you have tips on how to run employee engagement surveys?
Here are two final takeaways for running effective employee surveys:
Choose the right time – don't pick a time where everyone is super busy, distracted or likely to be away on holiday.
Communicate and over-communicate – your team won’t understand why you’re running employee surveys unless you tell them, so regularly communicate their value and importance. You could even consider offering incentives to encourage participation.
