An employee engagement survey is created to measure and assess how motivated and engaged the employees are on the basis of their daily performance and retention. Many organizations conduct employee engagement surveys once a year, while some prefer conducting them twice a year or even quarterly. The results of these surveys are usually helpful for the companies to drive changes and improve the organizational culture.
Employee engagement surveys usually consist of 40 to 50 questions organized into frames of reference or themes, which often consist of survey questions regarding satisfaction, job, team, management, and the organization as a whole. The themes may consist of leadership, management, safety, values, communication, teamwork, overall environment, training, and company benefits.
Research-based employee surveys consist of three important parts that accurately assess engagement, which include questions to measure the overall extent of employee engagement, engagement driver questions, and open-ended questions. For additional help, you can reach out to a credible employee engagement agency for better results.
The following are the top 10 questions that must be included in the employee engagement surveys.
THREE MOST IMPORTANT QUESTIONS FOR MEASURING OVERALL EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT
Most organizations adopt two methods in calculating employee engagement, i.e., either using the average score of all employee engagement questions or the result of only one question. Both the methods end up in an inaccurate measurement of engagement. For an accurate measurement of employee engagement, the average score from a subset of validated anchor questions must be used.
Engagement anchor questions are outlined to consider how engaged an employee feels in his or her job. It is recommended to use the results from five to six anchor questions for calculating the extent of engagement. The engagement levels can vary from highly engaged employees to fully disengaged employees.
The following are three such anchor questions that can be used to measure the overall level of employee engagement.
- How easy is it to become engaged in this work? This anchor question shows how involved an employee feels in his/her work.
- How likely are you to recommend this company to your friends as an employer? This anchor question analyses the extent of commitment an employee feels towards his/her company.
- Do you look forward to coming to work most days? When an employee feels how his/her work affects the organization, work becomes meaningful.
FIVE EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT QUESTIONS FOR MEASURING THE DRIVERS OF ENGAGEMENT
According to recent research, there are five key drivers of employee engagement, including meaning, autonomy, communication, impact, and team engagement. The following are five such questions that measure the drivers of employee engagement.
- Meaning – Do you find your work meaningful and purposeful? When an employee considers his/her work meaningful and purposeful, he/she tends to work harder and is happy with his/her work.
- Autonomy – Do you find autonomy in your job? When an employee is given the freedom to choose how to best perform his/her job, he/she works more efficiently with utmost efforts.
- Communication – Do you feel comfortable to present your ideas and opinions in our workplace? Communication within the organization is one of the most important factors to ensure transparency in the organization. Employees work more efficiently in an environment where they are able to express their ideas freely.
- Impact – Do you feel that your efforts make a difference and contribute to the overall success of our company? Employees are more likely to work harder if they feel that their efforts are recognized and account for the success of the company.
- Team engagement – Do you enjoy working with your colleagues, your boss and the social community of the workplace? A happy team involvement makes the members feel valued and the employees communicate without any hesitation and have no grudges with each other.
Also read: Why Employee Engagement is Key to Company Success
TWO OPEN-ENDED ENGAGEMENT SURVEY QUESTIONS
Open-ended comments give a lot of qualitative information and detail on the reasons behind the employee engagement survey scores. Two such simple open-ended questions are as follows:
- What all serve as the greatest strengths of our organization?
- What areas of our organization require improvement?
The above 10 questions act as a good initiative to build an employee engagement survey. Additional questions must be added in order to measure satisfaction elements for attracting and retaining employees.
A well-designed employee engagement survey is a great medium to assess employee’s work engagement, increases employee loyalty and satisfaction, and can be used to determine the areas in the organization that needs to be ameliorated.
