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Employee Engagement Survey

Nunzia

Hi There,

We are planning to run an employee engagement survey to understand how people generally feel about working in the company, including what they like and what they feel could be improved.

I’d really appreciate hearing about your experience with engagement surveys and any advice or recommendations you might have. In particular, would you suggest using mostly open-ended questions, multiple-choice questions, or a combination of both?

I’ve never run a survey like this before, so any guidance would be very helpful. We have several departments across the company, and I was thinking of asking the same core questions to everyone so that we can compare the results and identify any common themes or differences between departments.

Any suggestions on how best to structure the survey, the types of questions to include, or things to avoid would be greatly appreciated.

  • Hi Nunzia

    Check out the GallUp Q12 if you want external comparisons and also Engage for Success in conjunction with the CIPD - they will both give you some ideas for questions and some options if you want comparisons.

    I would suggest having a set of core questions that you will ask at every survey, that allows for comparisons and demonstrating trends, as well as some questions that you will ask topically based on business events or priorities. E.g. you could have your core questions, then ask one time about perceptions of your company benefits, another time about workloads and balance, another time about training and development etc.

    Know that the more questions you have, the less likely individuals will be to complete in full. So there is a balance between getting enough info to make it worthwhile and asking so much that you don't get a representative sample of data.

    Also think about whether this will be anonymous and how you will give assurance of that. You may need, for example, to combine departments. E.g. we're a small company and some of our back office functions only have one or two staff so we've combined 4 departments into one option. Also consider if you want managers to report separately to their teams, so have a manager/head of/slt category.

    Finally, one of my favourite questions is "use five words, separated by commas, to describe our company culture". I use the list to create a word cloud and it is a really powerful visual. Three years in a row we've had the same "top 3" words!

  • Keep it simple.

    Ask only about issues you are willing or able to change, alter, or improve.

    Unless you are going to produce some kind of sophisticated analysis of the results then perhaps keep it simple.  ie, 

    "What is the best thing about working for ............. ?
    "What is the worst thing about working for..............?

    "What would you change?

    Those three questions should pull out as much information as you might need.  Its easy to look through them and quickly see what issues are coming up.  IE, "most people who worked in department XX commented negatively on their manager",

    or:-" No comments  (or very few comments) were made about pay, or T & C".  etc.,

  • Hi Nunzia, the only comment I can add is to emphasise the need to follow through on employee comments and actually implement/change/improve whatever is required, and do this clearly and transparently.  All too often surveys are issued, comments provided, nothing changes and when the next survey follows the motivation to complete the questions plummets.  Cynicism can quickly be a bigger enemy than lack of engagement so please ensure there is a follow up.  

  • Hi Nunzia, you have some good ideas below. Following up is critical. Confidentiality is critical so if you are going to use an internal survey tool and survey you won't be able to guarantee that. You will also have to do a lot of internal analysis and data modelling so you need to ensure you can handle that and manage it and also be able to support managers and leaders in their efforts to respond or you can get stuck in data analysis/ paralysis. 

    There are lots of great companies who specialise in this and can help you to deliver it - using an external company does provide distance, trust, confidentiality and access to expertise- and it doesn't have to be expensive especially when you add in the time of the internal team to learn, develop, do the data and diagnosis. I'd avoid Gallop et al. I'd go for a company or partner that is smaller and can do bespoke work with your business and truly partner with you long term. 

    Happy to recommend some companies if you like. 

  • Just working on this too, having brought engagment to the table with our SLT after an unusual year!

    What is evident is that our existing pulse survey is completely ignored, some months I have been the only person to complete it. I think it's too long, tries to capture too much data across too many areas, and reviewing past results nothing raised in it was ever addressed.

    I also suspect management never actually looked at it...

  • in reply to Matthew

    Sounds familiar. There are some excellent tools out there, but they don't work without buy-in, engagement or doing the change work that wraps around it. In some cases it's about surfacing if there is any commitment behind it and to leave it until there is. People will appreciate the honesty even if they don't like the lack of interest.