Employee Engagement Survey: the Good, Ugly & Alternatives
Find out all about employee engagement surveys and other viable alternatives open to HR leaders to measure and boost workforce engagement.
Want to create a people-centric culture in your organization to reduce employee attrition and churn? here’s how in one sentence! Focus on the life source of your organization (the people) by Increasing engagement. An employee engagement survey (EES) comes to mind here.
Yet, other innovative tools have proven to be more effective in capturing data. This solution helps you implement more data-driven feedback. A Deloitte study shows that 71% of companies see people analytics as a high priority in their organization. You should too.
For good reasons, some have questioned the relevance of the EEC. In a big data and AI world, delivering great experience through actionable insights is foremost. This piece will outline employee engagement survey best practices, the problem with employee engagement surveys, and alternative approaches.
What is an Employee Engagement Survey?
Leading companies have built an enviable work culture through workforce engagement and stuck to it. Ever wondered why? Well here you go. Engaged employees mean customer retention and acquisition for them.
Employee engagement survey helps you to closely monitor employee morale and the condition of the work environment. It measures how employees feel appreciated at your company, identifies loopholes and conceive improvement plans to keep employees better engaged.
Employee Engagement Survey Best Practices
Determine Your Goal
Be goal-specific. Determine what and who you want to measure. Identify what you want to achieve with the survey. Knowing the employee engagement survey purpose is the first step to getting your survey questions right. Some potential objectives to note include:
- Seek ways to increase employee engagement levels in your organization
2. Find ways to increase employee retention
3. Improve manager-employees communication
4. Determine how to change toxic company culture
5. Establish ways to improve the employee net promoter score (eNPS)
Build and Distribute Survey
Consider using an excellent tool that can simplify, distribute and create employee engagement surveys. You also need employees to trust the survey process. Blink helps you create anonymous polls and distribute surveys. This way, you achieve better completion rates and get genuine feedback. What’s more, You can act on feedback by finding and creating solutions to employees’ difficulties.
Here’s how to begin.
- Create a form on Google, Survey Monkey, or Typeform (Blink supports all) and copy the URL
- Open the Blink admin panel, click on shared content.
- Select the folder in which to publish the form.
- Find the action menu in the right-hand column and click the form.
There’s an ‘Add form’ side panel where you select the form provider you use.
Next, paste the form URL that you copied earlier.
Set the name of the form (as you want it to appear to Blink users) and add a custom icon.
To add custom properties and share, find help here.
Ask the Right Questions
The employee engagement survey questions should align with the goal and objective of the survey. The right questions attract helpful answers. One way to do this is to spot areas of improvement that would boost engagement. Questions may include:
- What do you like about working here?
- What can we do to make things better?
- Do you feel a sense of belonging working here?
- How can we improve communication?
- Do you receive helpful feedback from your manager?
- Do you see growth potential in this organization?
- Is your workload reasonable?
- Are you with the reward and recognition policy here?
Don’t Overwhelm Respondents
The employee engagement survey is mainly to measure how invested employees are. It also examines the factors that influence engagement. The survey questions shouldn’t derail this.
Employees may get confused when you try to cover many areas at once. It as well won’t help you act on feedback. The Survey topic should be simple, specific, valuable, and measurable.
Avoid complex and ambiguous words to make questionnaires self-explanatory. Limit survey questions to 30–40 questions for good measure. A good length gives room to ask all relevant questions and rules out the tendency of repetition. Essentially, it should save employees’ time.
Promote Survey
Create some buzz around the survey exercise in advance. Send a series of creative emails to announce, invite, remind, and thank. Share additional resources where employees can learn more about EES. Use fliers to communicate the benefits of the survey exercise.
Get managers to fill out forms and provide feedback before the survey launch. Feedback helps you rephrase poorly-worded questions and make them more streamlined. Managers can help create anticipation in employees directly under them. Offer rewards to nudge as many people to participate.
Why Annual Survey Isn’t Enough
The Employee engagement survey falls short. They don’t identify where the problem lies no matter the number of surveys done. In one research conducted, only 22% of companies are getting good results. The EES is inadequate in the following ways.
Lacks Personalization
EES questions aren’t tailor-made to fit the needs of each employee. They are generic questions with a corporate tone that lacks engagement. Questionnaires can’t make conversations, listen to personal stories, and empathize.
Instead of the mechanical engagement survey, Liz Ryan, a Fortune 500 HR, suggests: “set up quick one-on-one conversations with any employee who wants to participate”.
Invaluable data
Employees may fear victimization for their brutal but honest responses. Nobody wants to get on the wrong side of the boss, not when they are looking to keep their jobs. If this is the case, data will be subjective and invaluable to feedback implementation.
Data is Fluffy
The percent favorable metrics adopted in most EES give misleading numbers.
The result often represents the percentage of respondents who selected a positive answer choice. Negative and neutral responses don’t count, resulting in skewed scores. So, a survey result can reflect high engagement but beneath those numbers are hidden problems.
In a case study by Harvard Business Review, United Parcel Service suffered significant losses after its annual survey failed to reveal issues concerning the increase of part-time jobs. The survey ‘lied’ because of fluffy data.
It’s Irregular
Making it an annual affair assumes that employees can remember every event in the last 11 months. That’s impossible. Consequently, employees would base their answers on recent incidents.
Annual surveys deal with just the moment. The result? Unholistic data influenced by random factors such as the mood of the respondent and recency bias. Conversely, with the influx of data in a data age, collecting data in real-time helps you objectively see the state of things.
Besides, an annual affair is not the kind of love and attention your employees need. It sends the wrong message that you do not care.
Engagement Survey alternative
It’s clear that an employee engagement survey idea can’t do much. Painfully, employees go through the mundane task of filling a form that thinks nothing of them. Questionnaires are same old, same old and employees see no ROI for feedback. Consider these alternatives.
Tracking Company-wide Metrics
Technological tools used in the workplace have analytics derived from employees’ day-to-day activities. These insights help HR managers spot patterns of organizational behaviors and address any concerns. Some HR metrics to track include,
- Employees on a leave
- Workers who have filed claim forms
- Number of employees who exited in the last 12 months
- Number of training hours employees attended
- Performance evaluation-ratings
- Number of discrimination complaints and lawsuits
- Average travel time (the shorter, the better)
- The average amount of relevant education employees get
- Number of employees on casual contracts
- Number of employees improving in their roles
Tracking requires more time and attention, but a specialized engagement platform can ease things up. Blink helps you identify up-to-date trends in your organization. It also spotlights areas of focus to help you prioritize your actions.
Pulse Surveys
Pulse surveys help you listen to employees’ views and feelings about their job and work environments. Because respondents are anonymous, feedback is candid, beneficial, and value-packed. Pulse surveys are done monthly or quarterly to boost engagement and it works.
According to Achievers Workforce Study, 44% of employees say they are very engaged when check-ins are more than 4 times per year. What’s more, employees love to be engaged this way. Qualtrics reports that up to 77% of employees are willing to give feedback more than once per year.
Town-hall Meetings
The ask-me-anything-meeting is an interactive Q&A session where every employee is present. It’s also a time for light-hearted talks.
Town Hall meetings present an opportunity to reiterate core values and get everyone aligned with them. To make it worthwhile, encourage employees to submit questions in advance to improve the quality of answers they get.
Final Thoughts
For years, HR and people teams have utilized the annual employee engagement survey to measure worker commitment and motivation. However, this is no longer sufficient in today’s fast-paced world. Relying on it alone places your organization in a no-win situation.
Build a Superior workforce by consulting employees regularly and making their voices count. Lastly, Identify and align key engagement elements with your company performance development plan and people strategies.
