3 Tips for Better Employee Engagement Surveys

3 Tips for Better Employee Engagement Surveys
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Many Companies Need Better Employee Engagement Surveys
It is possible to design and deliver better employee engagement surveys.  And if people are your greatest asset, you should be consistently monitoring employee engagement levels and trends to ensure your talent management strategy is set up to attract, develop, engage, and retain the people you need most to execute your strategy.

High Enough Engagement Survey Participation Rates
From our perspective, better employee engagement surveys have high survey participation rates and pinpoint the critical few actions required to improve levels of employee engagement and retention.  With the help of technology employee engagement surveys have become easier and more valuable compared to the old “paper and pencil days.”

High enough engagement survey participation rates allow you to measure if employees are behaving as strong advocates, giving all their discretionary effort, and intending to stick around for the long-term.

Three Tips for Better Employee Engagement Surveys
Based upon decades of data from assessing organizational cultures and feedback from new manager training participants, here are three tips for better employee engagement surveys:

1. Build the Business Case First
If you are hearing that you don’t have the budget to survey your employees or that an engagement survey is not a top priority, you probably have not created a sound business case for your key stakeholders.  Just think about it — how much would you pay to have your CEO visit every employee to learn how your organization could boost morale or increase productivity?

If your executive team is comfortable with dropping employee engagement lower on the priority list, it’s likely because you haven’t quantified the impact of employee engagement.  Let your leaders know:

  • 87% of highly engaged organizations report increased revenue
  • 86% report increased market share
  • 57% report lower employee turnover
  • 90% report higher stock prices

2. Create a Plan for Follow-Up Actions Before You Administer the Survey
Leadership follow-up on survey results is one crucial factor that can make or break your entire employee engagement process — and your leadership team needs to know that.  Make sure your leaders understand that if they don’t take engagement survey follow-up seriously, no one else will.

If they need help getting motivated, let them know that employees whose leaders acted on survey results were twelve times more engaged than those whose leaders didn’t follow up.  Then add questions to your survey to measure your organization’s effectiveness in following-up like:

  • I noticed positive change as a result of the last survey.
  • My manager shared the results of the last survey with our team.
  • Our team developed action plans to address issues raised by the last survey’s results.
  • Senior leadership is committed to responding to the results of this survey.

3. Define How You Will Hold People Accountable
Once your leadership team acknowledges the importance of survey follow-up, it’ll be easier to get your managers to buy in and take action.

  • First, provide your managers with the employee engagement training and resources they need to act upon the survey results.  To make it easier on managers, remind them that it is just a conversation.
  • Then, have managers sit down with their employees, share the engagement scores, learn where the improvement areas lie, and agree upon how to best tackle them going forward.
  • Lastly, incorporate employee engagement as a key performance indicator for manager success.

The Bottom Line
We believe that engaging and retaining employees should be part of every people manager’s job description.

To learn more about creating better employee engagement surveys and increasing engagement and retention levels at your company, download, Top 10 Most Powerful Ways to Boost Employee Engagement

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