What Makes an Effective Employee Engagement Survey?

Employee engagement surveys have become the most commonly utilised tool to effectively engage employees in the workplace. Many Human Resources (HR) leaders have become more conscious of the benefits that ensuring high levels of employee engagement brings, which has led to HR professionals utilising employee engagement surveys to push towards acquiring the benefits of employee engagement much faster.

To be a little specific, an employee engagement survey is a tool utilised to measure and capture data that will show critical information linked to the engagement, motivation and productivity levels of employees within an organisation. Although the question remains, what employee engagement survey actually works?

The best employee engagement surveys are well thought out surveys! These surveys are extremely targeted and avoid simply asking a bunch of random questions. The best surveys will look into key areas that the organisation sees as critically important to assess, as they will bring the highest levels of engagement and act as drivers of engagement for the business to look into.

Moreover, once these surveys have been launched and data has been successfully captured, receiving the thoughts, feedback and opinions of various organisational employees it becomes extremely critical for HR managers to take action and make necessary decisions on the data gained. Without taking any action on the data circumstances will never change and employee engagement levels will never be improved.

Pillars of Employee Engagement

As aforementioned, it is extremely critical for HR managers to conduct employee engagement surveys that are extremely well targeted to extract data in the necessary areas the organisation finds important to enhance employee engagement to the highest level possible. Likewise, organisations will identify various pillars that are essential in measuring how engaged employees are.

Dependent on the organisation, these pillars will differ as one business may find one key metric that closely aligns with an engaged employee within the organisation than another. The best employee engagement surveys will ask key employee engagement questions within each pillar gaining data on how well each pillar is performing to assess the overall level of employee engagement in the organisation.

If it is found that one pillar is performing poorly and other pillars are doing well, the poorly performing pillar may be isolated and worked on to effectively ensure that employee engagement is improved to the best level. Likewise, if all pillars are negative, the organisation has the chance to save the employee engagement within the organisation before productivity decreases and employees become highly disengaged and dissatisfied with the organisation.

Below we at EmployeeConnect have identified seven pillars that are largely common and utilised by various HR departments! (Utilise this as a framework to help you develop the pillars that best fit your organisation, to generate your best employee engagement surveys!). Furthermore, each pillar has an example survey question attached, although to learn more about each pillar, find out more survey questions and learn in detail how to achieve employee engagement we recommend you read our FREE eBook!

Trust

As an engagement pillar trust is defined as an employee’s overall feeling of the level of safety and health within the work environment when it comes to trusting individuals surrounding them. More specifically, this is the trust employees have for managers in having the integrity to do what is right. In turn, this trust may impact workplace goals and strategies.

• Do you feel comfortable working with others?

Impact

The engagement pillar that is impact is defined as the overall level of workplace impact an employee has. If the employee has all the available tools to complete tasks effectively through their self-motivation and can influence the work activities in a positive way impact is achieved.

• How motivated do you feel whilst at work?

Alignment

The pillar of alignment is defined as to achieve employee engagement when any alignment of positive personal employee feelings is achieved, moreover, the job is meaningful to the employee’s personal goals and objectives and in turn influences the organisation positively.

• What are your personal goals?

Empowerment

The empowerment pillar is defined as the employee feeling a sense of autonomy and self-determination to complete workplace activities, further, it involves a sense of freedom and discretion when at work, working with a sense of satisfaction and motivation for exceeding workplace norms.

• What do you wish to achieve within the organisation?

Recognition

The engagement pillar of recognition is defined as the moments an employee receives critical feedback, acknowledgement and further encouragement for their performance, work or commitment to the organisation.

• How valued do you feel within our organisation?

Development

The pillar of development is defined as the ongoing training and growth of an employee to work more proficiently, this is done through the acquirement of new knowledge, skills and experience to grow professionally within one’s career.

• Are the training programs influential to the skillset you wish to acquire?

Workplace

The pillar that is workplace is defined as the work environment that an employee is encompassed in that it is inclusive and both recognises and respects the individual. That is a working environment that aims to guide employees to their full potential. Moreover, a largely positive culture-driven environment that may be influenced by such factors as: positive teamwork, balanced flexibility, effective communication and further an enjoyable and fun environment.

• Are you comfortable within your workplace?

To see for yourself how our employee engagement module can help you improve not only employee engagement but also workplace culture, employee experience, employee satisfaction and many more benefits sign up for an EmployeeConnect demo.