How Employee Engagement Surveys Transform Businesses
Employee Engagement Surveys are also sometimes called Employee Satisfaction Surveys – but whatever you call them, they are the right thing to do. If you do them right!
Even just regularly asking how everything’s going will be perceived positively. But beware. If you ask the question and find out what’s wrong but then do nothing about it, you’ll just make things worse.
In an ideal, healthy working structure, you wouldn’t need Employee Engagement Surveys at all. You’d have a perfect feedback loop in which the team naturally raised, debated and resolved issues with each other as they occurred. Upwards, downwards and sideways. And nothing was ever left to fester.
However, working environments are never perfect. There often isn’t time to resolve every single sticking point as it comes up. And then other things arise that seem more important. Some issues need to be tackled at a higher level. And managers – and their managers – have their own priorities… It’s amazing how really quite important stuff can fall through the cracks.
We’ve all worked in places or heard about places where directors are absolutely amazed to discover that their team is fundamentally not very happy and hasn’t been for some time.
Done well, Employee Engagement Surveys will help prevent the above and stop you from ever reaching a crisis point where individuals, or the whole team, do not feel properly valued and motivated.
What are the Downsides of Employee Engagement Surveys?
The most important thing to understand about Employee Engagement Surveys is that they are not the only thing you need to do in order to have a happy team.
Achieving great Employee Engagement statistics is hard work. Maybe the hardest work in your organisation. You need to look at an Employee Engagement Survey as just one of a suite of tools and strategies for maximising the contribution of your people to the health and profitability of the business.
You also need to be aware that measuring employee engagement in survey form can have downsides. By far, the biggest issue is that of anonymity, or rather ‘perceived’ anonymity.
For starters, doing an anonymous Employee Engagement Survey, in which everyone’s identities are kept secret, can feel a bit desperate and like a last resort. It’s as if the only way the company can get honest feedback is by promising anonymity to employees.
Also, workers are assured that their answers to these surveys are private – so they can be free to be completely honest in their responses. However, no one really believes they are completely anonymous. They think a manager can surely get a pretty good idea of which team member is saying what.
The result is that employees feel pressure, or feel the easy thing to do, is to say what they think their bosses want to hear rather than what they actually think.
Another well-known issue is the way managers deal with the results. The responses can be a real test of a manager’s ability to deal with honest feedback.
In addition, the rate at which feedback is addressed is a key factor. Wait too long, and you may be tackling an issue that’s no longer relevant.
In summary:
- Be mindful of building trust when doing a survey, don’t lose trust by targeting individuals or responding to feedback negatively.
- Ensure managers are well equipped to tackle feedback in the right way with their team, using it as an opportunity to build credibility.
- Act at pace. Be mindful of the time from survey completion to sharing and actioning results. If momentum is lost, employees will lose confidence in the process and not be as forthcoming with feedback next time.
How Effective are Surveys for Businesses?
Employee engagement surveys consist of sending out a set of questions to collect employee feedback on various topics. The answers will allow you to gauge your people’s motivation and frustrations, unearthing areas for improvement.
A good engagement survey question aims to assess how committed employees feel towards a company and its mission, as well as how satisfied they are with their jobs.
The Gallup Q12 Employee Engagement Survey questions are a fantastic place to start. These have been tried and tested by many top businesses.
At Involvement, we try to be crystal clear on where we’re going as well as our expectations of colleagues. For example, we feel strongly about empowering colleagues, but this is very much a two-way street; there is an expectation on employees to deliver this too.
In addition, we have a clear 3-year plan, and 6 monthly priorities, and everyone has personal quarterly goals on their High Performance Plan. This provides transparency and gives multiple opportunities for colleagues to provide feedback.
Each survey question should be simple to understand and relate directly to your business plans and goals.
Consider asking questions that will tell you:
- Are people clear about their responsibilities?
- Are they properly equipped to do what’s expected of them?
- Do they receive regular, honest feedback about how they are performing?
- Do they feel their welfare is being thought about?
- Are their views properly considered and acted on?
- Do they feel the business is going in the right direction?
How Often Should Companies Do Engagement Surveys?
Through a combination of relatively brief but frequent surveys, sometimes called ‘pulse’ surveys, and more in-depth questionnaires, problems can be identified and addressed before they can do too much damage.
Ideally, you’ll ask the same questions over a period of months or years, so you can assess progress on particular KPIs.
It’s a good idea to establish a set of core questions that will determine the health of the team over time. The ones you will keep asking.
You can also do surveys when you are planning something, to see whether people think it will work, and after you have done something – to see whether it worked out as expected.
At Involvement, we tend to do 6 monthly pulse surveys to keep an eye on things. We also do an annual slightly bigger survey. As an Investors in People Gold Accredited organisation, we use the IIP survey mechanism, which enables us to track progress against their key indicators.
It can be very valuable to carry out an Employee Engagement Survey when:
- You are planning a significant change in what you do or introducing new ways of working to the business.
- You have been through a particularly turbulent or challenging period.
How Much Does it Cost to Do an Employee Engagement Survey?
The cost of carrying out Employee Engagement surveys depends on several factors.
If you are a small team with a clear purpose, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to put together an effective survey internally at no cost at all – apart from everybody’s time. We often use Microsoft Forms, Google Forms or Survey Monkey to conduct Pulse Surveys.
We’d always recommend online digital forms to be used over paper. For our warehouse and driver colleagues who don’t have their own computers, we set up a shared computer in a private room where colleagues can go in and complete their responses in confidence.
Once you start enlisting outside assistance, costs will obviously become a factor.
There are survey companies who will put the questions you want to ask into a format which can be accessed online by
your teams. After everyone has responded, the company will send you an evaluation of the results, all clearly set out. The main benefit of this is that you can benchmark against other companies in your industry, a lot of time is saved on results analysis, and these companies will often give advice on how to proceed.
As you’d expect, these kinds of surveys can cost thousands. But you get what you pay for. If you have less resources internally to analyse and action results, it may be worth enlisting the help of a company that can assist with this.
Always remember the more thought and care you put into the process, the more you’ll benefit. You can’t just pay a specialist and walk away. Maintaining a continuous feedback loop is the key to kick-starting successful improvement in your employee engagement.
To keep the feedback loop going, we’d recommend debriefing after every employee engagement survey that you complete. The debrief can be done with management and colleagues alike to gauge how the process went and highlight any improvement areas before you conduct the next survey. You can find our debrief template here.
