The Benefits of Employee Engagement Surveys
When you’re busy running a business, it’s easy to lose sight of employee needs—that’s where the benefits of employee engagement surveys come into play.
What Is Employee Engagement?
Employee engagement refers to the level of emotional investment and commitment an employee feels toward their job and the organization they work for.
There are many factors that can influence employee engagement, including:
- Organizational culture
- Leadership
- Training and development
- Compensation and benefits
- Work-life balance
Typically, engaged employees are more motivated, productive, and loyal, which can lead to better business outcomes—in fact, according to Gallup, high employee engagement can increase productivity by 21%.
Employee Survey Best Practices
Employee engagement surveys measure your employees’ commitment, motivation, sense of purpose, and passion for their work and your organization. Measuring the engagement of your workforce using surveys can provide valuable insights to help attract and retain top-performing team members.
Here are a few employee survey best practices to keep in mind during the surveying process:
Consider Your Objectives
It’s important to consider your key objectives for conducting the survey before administering it. What’s the driving force behind the survey? Is it tied to your organization’s business strategy?
Many companies find it useful to form a multilevel, cross-functional team to consider strategy questions that ensure the survey meets your objectives. Before administering the survey, consider the following factors:
- Who will create the questions?
- Who will be asked to participate in the survey?
- When will we conduct the survey?
- Will all results be communicated?
- Who will be held accountable for implementing changes driven by survey results?
- Are there questions from previous surveys that should not be included again?
- Are there questions from previous surveys that need to be rewritten?
Use a Third-Party Provider
Administering surveys internally often makes employees feel leery about taking them due to privacy concerns about who receives the information. To improve participation and transparency, consider partnering with an employee engagement survey provider to oversee the survey and provide anonymous overviews of the results. Partnering with a third-party provider that enforces complete anonymity helps ensure accurate results.
Keep It Short and Simple
The number and types of questions you include in your survey significantly impacts the response rate. When constructing open-ended questions, make sure they’re to the point and use terminology familiar to all employees. A good employee engagement survey should contain no more than 75 questions and take no longer than 20 to 30 minutes to complete.
Use Metrics Wisely
To ensure your survey is successful, make sure to give employees enough time to complete it and send them reminders to do so. As results come in, review the response rates based on the specific job, department, and division. If you’re working with a third-party provider, they can provide details as the surveys are completed.
Communicate Results
Once the results are in, it’s important to communicate them transparently to your workforce—regardless of the positive or negative feedback that may be present. Without timely communication of survey results, the exercise adds no value to your organization.
Implement Changes
It’s easy for employees to become disillusioned when their feedback isn’t acted upon. If you don’t have a plan for implementing changes based on employee input, you could be doing more harm to your company culture and engagement levels. Start by having an open dialogue with HR and leadership to create a plan to implement changes. Make sure everyone understands that the goal is to create tangible changes to improve employee acquisition and retention.
The Benefits of Employee Engagement Surveys
Helps Attract and Retain the Right Talent
Happy employees are more productive and tend to stay with an organization longer. Companies that invest in creating a positive work environment for their employees will reap the rewards in the long run, as a healthy, engaged workforce attracts other like-minded individuals, improves morale, and increases productivity.
Builds Team Culture
If you don’t know what your team thinks about your workplace culture, it’s difficult to determine areas where you can make improvements. By surveying your employees, you can get an understanding of how they feel about their work environment so you can implement changes to build a better culture.
Detect Overall Knowledge Gaps
Employee engagement surveys also allow you to detect overall knowledge gaps and fill them using timely, efficient workplace training solutions, such as online courses, workshops, seminars, and company events. You can also use surveys to create internal knowledge banks where employees can access useful information and resources. By taking the time to identify knowledge gaps through employee engagement surveys, you can provide employees with an efficient way to improve their skills.
Improves Employee Safety
Research from Gallup shows that workplaces with higher levels of employee engagement have 70% fewer safety incidents than those that are disengaged. A safer workplace often results in fewer lawsuits filed against your organization involving safety and work conditions. Plus, people are drawn to safe workplaces. When your organization is known as a safe place to work, you can attract more talented employees.
Partner With an Experienced Employee Engagement Survey Provider
AAIM Employers’ Association is a third-party employee engagement survey provider specializing in custom employee engagement surveys that help attract and retain top talent. As a third-party survey provider, we enforce complete employee anonymity to ensure accurate results. When you partner with us, you can customize your company surveys to get the answers you need to keep your workforce engaged and satisfied. Our surveys can provide insights on:
- Processes
- Policies
- Supervisor management
- Communication
- Compensation
- Operations
- And more!
Our team can also make an unbiased presentation of your survey results and provide recommendations to your leadership team. Contact us today to learn more about our employee engagement surveys.
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