You’ve got a fantastic team of dedicated, top-tier talent who’s invested in seeing themselves and the company succeed. They’re hitting targets and smashing through deadlines. The work they produce is consistently high-quality, and clients are happy. Things appear to be going well, and it seems full steam ahead is the mantra of the age at your office.
But how long will this situation last? Is your high-performing team always going to be this effective? What if you lost a key employee? Would they still be able to hit those targets?
The thing is, a high-performing team needs to be nurtured and maintained for it to continue being high-performing. One way to gauge whether any potential cracks in team morale or workplace satisfaction could affect your team’s ability to get things done and your retention of great talent is through the regular use of an employee engagement survey.
Employee engagement surveys are a critical management tool for uncovering aspects of workplace dynamics and employee sentiment that might go unnoticed. While I’ve seen many organizations use these surveys once a year, the gap between the information gathered, and any changes put in place is simply too large to be of use. However, an employee pulse check survey is a much shorter, more useful version to gather feedback and make your organization more agile and responsive, as well as boost employee retention.
What is an Employee Engagement Survey?
The Basics of an Employee Engagement Survey
At the core, an employee engagement survey is a method to measure employee involvement, satisfaction and well-being. Three broad areas of workplace life are typically covered, namely, job satisfaction, the workplace environment, and leadership support.
By monitoring how your team feels about their job, the dynamics of their team, and the support they have from leadership in their work, management can be more responsive and make changes that will keep employees engaged and increase retention. However, finding out how your employees feel means asking the right questions.
Key Questions to Include in Your Employee Engagement Survey
A good employee engagement survey will ask questions to get to the heart of the issue. You don’t want to beat around the bush, but you don’t want to ask yes/no questions either. Aim to ask questions that provide employees an opportunity to give longer responses but also minimize generalized answers.
For example, I’ve seen effective questions like the ones listed below provide great feedback to managers at other organizations.
- Job satisfaction
- How do you currently feel about work today?
- Would you recommend our company as a great place to work? What makes you feel that way?
- Workplace culture
- What aspects of your work do you find meaningful and why?
- In what ways do you feel recognized for your accomplishments? How could recognition be improved?
- Team dynamics
- How would you describe your experience working with your team?
- Are there any changes we could make to team practices that would enhance the atmosphere for you?
The Employee Satisfaction Index and How It Fits Into Surveys
Understanding the Employee Satisfaction Index
The employee satisfaction index is a fantastic tool for tracking employee happiness and morale. Managers who use this tool have much higher rates of retention as it allows organizations to change according to employee needs.
Managers are busy people, and sometimes, they need to be aware of key information in order to make informed decisions. An employee satisfaction index boils down employee sentiment into quantifiable data and allows managers to track changes over time. This helps highlight areas for improvement in the workplace.
For instance, an employee satisfaction index is often a short questionnaire that asks employees to rate their opinions on a scale of one to ten. It’s simple and to the point so that you can get feedback from employees regularly. Getting regular quantifiable feedback means you can look for trends that could be popping up and affecting team morale. Do employees rate their job satisfaction lower around the holidays? How do they feel going into the new year? Is there an uptick in feelings of engagement, or do you see a downturn that could point to some team members looking elsewhere?
You can also take those responses and segment them into departments or different categories to determine what may need to change on a more direct level. Rather than just having an idea about broad employee sentiment across your organization, this allows you to target specific issues that are affecting employees’ daily work lives.
Benefits of Using Workplace Engagement Software
Why Workplace Engagement Software is Essential
One way to help manage workplace engagement is to use workplace engagement software. These tools offer real-time feedback on how your employees are feeling, are easy to distribute to managers of specific teams, and make creating employee engagement surveys easy.
There are plenty of employee engagement software options available that can streamline survey processes. For example, CultureAmp is great for its customizable survey templates, 15Five can be used with productivity tools like Slack and Google Calendar, and TINYPulse has unique built-in immediate feedback tools.
Pulse Check Surveys and Their Role in Employee Engagement
What is a Pulse Check Survey and Its Advantages in Your Engagement Strategy
As mentioned earlier, a pulse check survey is a short, routinely administered survey that’s useful for garnering quick insights into employee sentiment. Many organizations conduct annual surveys, but it’s often better to “take the pulse” of your team to maintain an ongoing understanding of employee engagement throughout the year.
Pulse check surveys help managers detect issues with employee engagement and morale early and offer quick, actionable insights into how employees are feeling. Using pulse check surveys leads to higher employee engagement since it allows managers to be proactive in responding to concerns at multiple points throughout the year. And since they also tend to be shorter than annual surveys, employees are more likely to respond since it won’t interfere as much with their daily tasks.
Best Practices for Designing Effective Employee Engagement Surveys
Crafting Effective Survey Questions and Analyzing Results
There’s nothing useful about an employee engagement survey that gives you irrelevant data or insights. To avoid this, you should ensure your questions are phrased clearly and that you haven’t unnecessarily included any bias in the survey design.
Keep the wording of your questions clear, focused and specific to one issue. For instance, a question such as “How do you feel about your work and team?” would better be phrased to ask either about their work or their team.
Additionally, you might inadvertently include bias in the question by asking, “How would you rate the support you receive from management?” While this is a valid question, it implies that employees are already receiving support, which could lead them to give a positive answer when, in fact, they believe the opposite.
Final Thoughts
Creating impactful employee engagement surveys requires a little initial effort but will pay off in improved communication between management and the teams they work with. It’s important to consider how questions are phrased, how often surveys are sent out, and to understand what to do with the insights you gather.
I recommend making use of pulse check surveys and workplace engagement software to improve employee satisfaction and retention. If you’re looking for an even deeper understanding of how you can increase employee satisfaction long-term, I encourage you to sign up for our monthly newsletter, which contains comprehensive recommendations on constructing and maintaining a high-performing team. Signing up will also get you notified of the release of my upcoming book, “The Retention-Productivity Link”, for an even deeper look into the mechanics of workplace teams backed by real-world case studies gathered through my experiences with multiple organizations.
