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Start a free trialUnderstanding your team’s concerns and gathering employee feedback is a must. It’s all well and good to say to have a positive workplace culture, but it’s another matter to have systems and processes that foster this kind of environment.
So this is where surveys come into place – along with crafting the right type of employee engagement survey questions to go with them.
By having the right wording and the right type of questions, you give team members the time and space to be heard — with an overall positive impact on employee retention.
In this article, I will cover the different types of employee engagement survey questions to measure various aspects of your business - motivation, teamwork, leadership and management, etc. - analyse the benefits they offer, and share with you how we run engagement surveys and what kind of engagement questions we ask at a company like Charlie.
Engagement survey questions measure your employees' commitment through different types of survey questions. Your employees can:
This is, of course, just a sample of the kind of employee engagement survey questions you can have and there's plenty more you can create on your own.
I've been running and writing employee engagement survey questions since the beginning of Charlie – or at least when we decided to run engagement surveys, and it's been a while now.
As Chief of Staff, engagement is a metric I have to keep an eye on to retain and keep our team members engaged – but when I first had to come up with questions, I realised I had no clue where to start.
So when we ran our first engagement survey to get people's honest opinions on our unlimited holiday policy (our first ever company-wide survey), I sat down and asked myself the following things:
Once these questions were answered, all I needed to do was write the questions and send the survey! The results led us to completely scrape our unlimited holiday policy, as we found out our team members did not actually like it. Even worse, the policy caused them stress and kept them from taking enough holidays during the year.
Without the right engagement questions, we would have never uncovered any of these. It was a turning point for us – it would take a bit of time to run our surveys, but we would do it right.
Like any type of content, engagement survey questions have to be clear and concise. This is crucial so team members can give precise answers to your questions.
You want them to give you their opinion on a particular topic, and you want it to be focused on a specific area, so perhaps a good idea is to ask a few people to read through the questions and ask them what they understand so you know your questions clear, and not up to interpretation.
Many people feel nervous about giving honest opinions for fear of repercussion – that's why you should make engagement survey questions' responses anonymous.
This will give your team members the space to be truthful – but feedback goes beyond engagement surveys. You should make it a natural, but uncomfortable part of any journey at your business by normalising it every step of the way.
Frequency can be a tricky one. At Charlie, it took me a while to understand how often we should run surveys. Of course, a yearly one can be useful, but how do you get a satisfying completion rate when people are not used to them?
That's when running pulse surveys throughout the year can help – this can be useful for motivation, for example, and will get everyone into the habit of answering the surveys sitting in their inbox.
At Charlie, we run a monthly survey to measure engagement with two statements and a rating scale from 1 to 10:
This is also a useful way to see when engagement peaks and drops within our organisation, allowing us to take action if needed.
To help you come up with your own engagement survey questions, I'll share below the ones we have used at Charlie in the past for different areas of the business – I'll also tell you why we think each topic has its own importance and why running a survey on it could help.
Why it matters? "Happy" employees are more likely to be high-performing, so you should always check whether your team members are satisfied with the work they're doing and the people they're collaborating with.
Why it matters? Poor mental health and employee burnout can lead to high absence rates, impacting your productivity levels and the wellbeing of your team, so you should always keep a finger on the pulse to prevent it from happening.
Why it matters? Recruitment processes can be long and difficult. What you want are team members that are in for the long run. That goes without saying that caring about their job satisfaction and career aspirations will be crucial to this retaining strategy.
Why it matters? Employees with no sense of purpose and no strong leadership to lead them will soon be demotivated. It's important to share as much information as possible so your team members trust your business and want to contribute to your goals. Secrecy will lead you nowhere.
Why it matters? Leadership also means line management – do you know how your managers perform and how strong their leadership skills are? It will be useful to get an understanding and perhaps get everyone on a training course if results are poor.
Why it matters? For small businesses and startups, getting team members in and allowing them to hone in on their skills is essential – it will make your business a hub for learning and retaining team members.
Why it matters? HR policies are the pillars on which your business stands. If no one at your business follows the rules or cares about them, it will soon be chaos. It's also essential that you keep consulting your team and iterate on them so they don't outgrow your business.
Why it matters? Recruitment and onboarding are the first impressions a new hire gets from your business. Poor processes will lead to confusion and may mean that your new hire won't pass probation or leave if they don't feel there is enough structure to support them.
Why it matters? Every team member wants to be rewarded for the work they do. Having performance management processes that are fair, equitable and regular will ensure you retain team members and reward high-performing team members for hard work.
Why it matters? Ensuring you have an effective DE&I strategy in place, along with actions to improve it will give you a broad range of perspectives and make sure all voices are heard within your business.
Why it matters? Having a business also means having to deal with disagreements and conflicts – but how does your team feel about the way you're handling it? Finding out will help you make adjustments where needed and handle conflicts to avoid any legal implications in the future.
Some well-thought-out top-level strategic decisions from the beginning stages will help ensure your questions are helpful and provide data and information you can act upon – but what happens next?
It’s also worth noting that organising an HR survey manually is extremely time and labour-intensive and requires you to allocate resources and operational man-hours for distributing the surveys, collecting the responses, and analysing the data.
For this aspect, CharlieHR’s Engagement Surveys feature is highly useful for automating the whole process - from collecting the answers anonymously to aggregating the survey results. Not only does it make implementing the responses easier, but it also leads to a higher response rate and higher-quality survey responses through automatic reminders.
When you leverage automation technology and use a structured approach, you can execute HR surveys that are helpful, useful, and smart, and give you actionable insights to help build a better company.
Using an employee engagement software and pulse survey tool like Charlie helps you streamline the entire survey process, from creating the questions to analysing the results.
Experience the benefits of an improved HR survey process today by starting a free trial of CharlieHR, and be a force for positive change for your company and your team.
As a bonus, check out our employee engagement survey template to find out more.
