Employee engagement surveys are vital tools to help businesses understand and build stronger employee-employer relationships. This ensures businesses can retain top talent and grow sustainability with a happy and engaged workforce.

Staff surveys help create a process that encourages a clear communication channel between employees and employers. This helps identify potential issues that could be impacting employee engagement, as well as learning what parts of the business are currently working well at keeping employees happy.

Although businesses may be tempted to quickly put a staff survey together and quiz their employees, it pays to take the time to develop something that will provide significant value for both parties. Creating and launching surveys that help pinpoint how engaged, motivated and dedicated employees are towards the business is crucial in creating sustainable business growth.

A happy workforce is the first step towards being able to achieve success as a business.

How to create an employee engagement survey

Employee surveys can come in any shape or size. From quick questions to in-depth interviews, it’s up to the business. Here at Edgecumbe, we pride ourselves on helping our clients leverage employee engagement surveys to help identify, track, action, and measure, potential issues and positives that are impacting employee happiness.

The ability for employee engagement surveys to make an impact, lies in the questions asked and the way the surveys are conducted. All the best intentions can be ruined by poor questions that fail to yield meaningful answers.

We’ve developed the Head, Heart and Hands model of engagement to help create a structure around the types of questions that should be asked. By defining employee engagement this way, we can ensure the questions create meaningful answers. This means business can implement the following:

  • Head (intellectual buy-in) – Employees feel more secure and confident
  • Heart (emotional buy-in) – Employees feel more committed and proud
  • Hands (behavioural effort) – Employees feel motivated and focussed

Focusing on the intent and underlying themes behind engagement, instead of generic questions, means businesses can create surveys that make the impact they were hoping for. Every question asked should be related to an underlying theme that is likely to have an impact on employee engagement.

Once you’ve got a good idea of the type of questions you want to ask, you can start to think about how to format this. For frequent, quick insights, putting the questions together as a Pulse Survey is a great option. Similarly, there are other ways, such as full annual engagement surveys, qualitative research, one on one interviews, and other formats you can leverage.

A staff survey could be used as a general tool, or specific ones created for defined parts of the business. It really depends what you want to get out of them. With a wealth of experience creating and analysing employee engagement surveys, please don’t hesitate to get in touch and let us show you all the possibilities. We can help show you case studies and templates as well as our reporting and analytical software to make the job clear and simple.

Analysing employee surveys

Once you’ve conducted staff surveys, it’s important to analyse, interpret and action what you’ve found. This is where we feel our team can provide real value to businesses by helping leverage the data and turn it into actionable insights. Our engagement framework means we can identify which areas should be prioritised to make the biggest impact. We can also help provide benchmarks and help determine how engaged your staff are compared to expectations and market levels.

We ensure leaders and teams become more successful by evolving in line with the employee engagement results.

Tips for creating employee surveys

It’s important that any employee survey is transparent, and the aims clearly defined. This will mean employees understand the purpose of the survey and will feel more confident to offer their true perspective.

It is also better to use very simple language and not over complicate things. If employees are giving answers without fully understand the question, it won’t lead to meaningful results.

It’s also recommended to reduce barriers and make it as easy as possible for employees to participate in the survey. Asking employees to stay late to fill it out is not going to make the surveys a popular activity. Instead, employees should be given time to complete them during working hours.

Successful surveys will also focus on the things that actually matter to employees. The House of Engagement is a model we’ve created here at Edgecumbe and helps provide some visual structure in terms of the types of topics you should focus on. By following this, you can ensure you are asking questions that will yield answers related to why employees are more or less engaged. This will create more actionable insights that can be used to improve employee satisfaction.

This approach often highlights the complexity of engagement and how a pay increase is far from the answer in the majority of cases. Important drivers of engagement include autonomy, progression, clarity of role, feedback and recognition, respect, corporate vision, team cohesion, and the list goes on. It is the role of the employee engagement survey to reveal how employees truly feel about all these aspects of working life.

Employee surveys at Edgecumbe

Gaining the data from staff surveys and employee engagement strategies is only half the battle – understanding what to do with that data becomes paramount for business success. Here at Edgecumbe, we perform key driver analysis on engagement survey results in order to demonstrate which aspects of working life are the most important to your staff and therefore most likely to drive their level of engagement up. This means we can help you create focussed and actionable strategies to develop processes and environments that make it more likely that your employees will fully engage.

The benefits of having a workforce that is engaged and aligned with company ambitions and objectives, means your business has the fuel to succeed long-term.

For more information on how we can help, get in touch today.