Employee Engagement Surveys are difficult to create and decipher. This might be because you’re not asking the right number of questions or the right kind to fully understand whether your Employee is engaged at work. The problem begins with the basic mistakes made by HRs today and that is understanding what employee engagement is.

Employee engagement is often confused with employee satisfaction which is why you might face issues in creating the right survey. Let’s clear that query.

Employee engagement can be defined as the level of passion and commitment your employees have towards the company and the work. It also indicates the amount of effort your employees would put for the company and into any task.

Employee satisfaction, on the other hand, is only the level of happiness and content feeling your employee has at the workplace. It does talk about the factors such as motivation, commitment etc.

If you need more help on employee engagement, check out our blog on it – How to Drive Productivity at the Workplace.

Now that that’s cleared out, let’s talk about why would HR managers create a survey to measure the engagement of an employee.

Some basic tips to keep in mind

(Source: HR TECH WEEKLY)

It isn’t easy to measure each one of your employee’s engagement level through observation. How they approach a question that is asked to them, regarding their work and the company, does give a lot of the data you need to measure this aspect.

When you’re preparing these surveys, you must keep in mind to statically validated and benchmarked against that of other companies. Without this, your survey would not be that effective in capturing the data you’re looking for. Another important tip I would give you is too make sure you create a long enough survey. A short survey, with few questions, will just give you an indication than a reason for why your staff is engaged or disengaged.

Core components of an employee engagement survey

While preparing your questions for the survey, you must test two main aspects.

1. Engagement with the organisation which records the opinion/feeling your staff has with the hierarchical structure, leadership, the vision of your company etc.
2. Engagement with the Manager which focuses on the work relations your employee has with his/her direct boss. It also speaks about how one feels about the level recognition and feedback he/she receives.

 

The most important part – The Questions

Now that we’ve spoken about the components and essence of an employee engagement survey, the next step is to think about the questions. This is the major challenge in the HR fraternity as the details above are not given too much emphasis.

Well, to help you out, we’ve created a list of questions to put into your survey in order to capture all the relevant data you need. To make it easier to understand, we have broken it down into categories:

General Happiness and Satisfaction

(Source: DATIS)

• From a scale of 1-10, how happy are you with working with our company?

This is the most basic and also the most important question you should have in your survey. It could a summary to all the questions and be put in the end or at the beginning and then examine further. Companies with happier employees are 12% more productive but 48% of employees report being “somewhat happy” or “unhappy” at work (Teem). Therefore, asking about happiness is the first and most crucial part of the survey.

• Would you recommend this company as a great place to work for a friend, relative etc. ?

Another question that tests the overall happiness and satisfaction of an employee with his/her job. When you sell your product to a customer, you would ask this question to them to find out if they actually loved the experience. It’s the same thing with your employees.

 

• Are you able to maintain a great work-life balance being part of this company?

No matter how much employees love their work, they would want to make sure that its not the only thing going on in their life. Having the perfect work-life balance will help boost productivity, speed at work. It also shows how comfortable your employee is with the working condition.

 

• How would rate the overall leadership practice within the company (1-10)?

As much as you might think you’re a great leader, you’re only as good as much as you’re employees say so.  Just 27% of the millennial men and 21% of the millennial women describe their leadership as strong. So you might want to know if you’re part of this statistic. If not, you need to get back to the drawing board.

 

• If you quit the company, why do you think you would do so?

A harsh but much needed question on the list. Credit Suisse estimates that it saved $75 million to $100 million in rehiring and training costs by finding out the reason why an employee would quit.

• Are you proud of being part of this company?

Its one thing to be satisfied with the company but its better to have an employee who is proud of coming to work at your company. This would definitely boost productivity and hard work at the workplace. Finding this information helps inculcate practices to induce a sense of pride into your employees.

Manager- Employee relations

(Source : RMG)

• How would you rate the overall leadership skill of your immediate boss (1-10)?

Around 75% of the employees leave their company because of their boss. One bad manager/ leader can cost you high employee turnover. So you would want to make sure you have this question on your survey. It also tells you which managers would require better training on handling their team. In other words, it helps in L&D decisions making.

• How comfortable are you in approaching your boss for any query, problem, feedback etc. ?

Now, this can depend on whether the employee is an introvert or an extrovert but it also tells you how much effort is being put by the manager in ensuring that he is approachable to every employee.

• Would you consider your boss as a role model?

We know this sounds cliché but if this is what an employee feels, it implies that the employee is happy with the learnings he/she receives from the manager. This saves cost on a separate training/learning program.

• How often does your boss give you feedback/review on your work?

According to a survey by PWC, more than 75% of employees believe that feedback is valuable and nearly 60% of survey respondents reported that they would like feedback on a daily or weekly basis. In fact, I’ve published another blog on offering continuous feedback over annual performance review, which might help you in understanding the benefits of such a system and provide you with some tips on how to implement it.

Organisational – Employee’s Objectives

(Source: LinkedIn)

• Are your career goals in line with the company goals?

Although your employee and your company might not have the same path, the end goals aren’t generally that far off. This question is important in understanding whether the employee is the right cultural fit for the company.

 

• How would rate the way we service our customers (1-10)?

If your employees aren’t supportive of the way you do business with your clients/customers, productivity and sincerity from their side would be low and intended outcomes would not be achieved. It also would lead to absenteeism. You wouldn’t change your company’s practices for an employee but you would find the right fit for the path your company takes.

• Would you say that you fully understand and are thorough with the company’s objectives and policies?

If so, write down five of the most important ones. :  An employee that understands the objectives and policies of the company will know what he/she is doing and will work much better than the one who doesn’t. Unfortunately, only 14% of employees understand the organization’s strategy. With this question, you can find out if your employees know what the mission/vision is.

Employee’s Work and Work Culture

(Source: Quora)

• How passionate are you about your work?

 This gives a gist of how much your staff like what they’re doing in the company and to what extent they think it impacts the company as a whole. An employee who feels that his/her work is important to the company would be more hardworking.

• Do you feel valued and recognized for the work you do?

70% of employees say that motivation and morale would improve “massively” with managers recognizing their work but around 42% of employees believe their accomplishments go unnoticed. When an employee is not recognized, a feeling of being undervalued gets instigated which will force him/her to leave the company soon.

• Is your work in line with your career goals?

Many of the employees in the world take up a job for the money or out of force. This affects their career path and subsequently affects the interest and quality of work. It also indirectly speaks about the happiness of an employee.

• From 1-10, how much do you feel that the company has a positive work culture?

64% of all employees do not feel they have a strong work culture. Poor work culture will reduce productivity and profitability of the company, in fact by around 50%. So, it pays to find out if you have a good work culture in place.

• Do you feel that the company transparent with you about important matters?

In order for your employees to fully understand the purpose of their work, the company’s vision and the end outcome of each and every task they perform, you have to be completely transparent about it with them.  There is a great article –Why Transparency in Business Should Be the Norm that tells you the importance of being transparent and how to do so. Being transparent builds credibility and trust.

 

• Do you feel that the work timings and culture is reasonably flexible?

This goes back to fear and comfort at the workplace. You should give your employees the freedom to work at a reasonable level of comfort to get the best out of them.

 

Peer relations

(Source: AtmanCo)

• How would you rate the work relations you have with your peers?

A Sad fact, Human Resource managers spend at least 24% of their time resolving employee relations problems. You don’t want your HRs dealing with such an issue. So, find out what your employee feels about the work relations and behavior in general. Many employees leave their job for this reason and hence its something you should definitely ask about.

 

• Have you faced any abusive behavior from your boss or peers at or outside of work?

Now, this is a serious issue. Bullying and abusive behavior happen in the workplace as well and you might not even know about. Some of them go beyond the workplace and reach a personal level leading to serious problems like depression and suicides. If you think I’m just saying, know that 48% of employees report that they have experienced abusive behaviour at work. What is worse is that women are a serious victim of this issue, One-in-four women are sexually harassed at work.

 

• Are you respected by your peers and managers at work?

A lot of your existing employees feel that they hold the right to yell and show sternness you the new entries of the company because they feel that will impart discipline and hard work.  In my opinion, this is the most important stage of a new entry and showing a hard work culture and being strict and stern would only tarnish the image and the interest your employee shows at work.

 

• Do you feel that you can set good personal relations with your colleagues?

You might feel that this point might be irrelevant to the company or even detrimental to productivity. While you might be right on some level, good personal relations between employees does increase the comfort level at work to an extent. On the other hand, poor personal relations can most certainly shatter the speed and quality at work.

 

• Do you feel that teamwork is effective at work?

Many of your employees might feel that there are those few who spend most of their time distracted and getting only half of their work done. Working with these kinds can be difficult and demotivating. So, asking in your survey can help you understand whether your employees feel that there is hard work and a driven nature in the company.

What to take away from this?

Keeping your employees engaged can be a pain. You need to capture copious amounts of accurate data to get the best results. Your survey is the starting point to this process and possibly the most important one. So, you certainly have to get it right. Each aspect of the above questions targets a crucial factor that drives attrition. We’ve covered 24 strong questions but there is one important 25^th question that you should be asking –

‘What suggestions would you give to improve the workplace and make it better for you? ‘

Even if the employee loves the work and the company, there is always room for improvement. Find out what it is and keep working on it. Eventually, with the help of this continuous process, you can achieve maximum engagement and move closer to being termed the best place to work.

Just like you, we also have room for improvement, let us know what you thought about this blog and give us your feedback in the comments below.

Did we miss anything?  Have more questions in mind?

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