When we\u2019re finished, you\u2019ll be ready to create and distribute a survey to measure employee engagement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let\u2019s get started.<\/p>\n\n\n
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<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\nDefining employee engagement<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Before we create an employee engagement survey, it\u2019s essential to know what we mean by employee engagement. It looks different in various industries, but there are some commonalities that we can focus on. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s also important to understand what employee engagement is not <\/em>before creating a survey. Too often, employee engagement is confused with job satisfaction, but there\u2019s a distinct difference between the two.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Finally, think about why employee engagement matters to your business. Once you figure that out, I\u2019m confident you\u2019ll want to identify where your own employees\u2019 levels of engagement fall!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Employee engagement<\/a> looks at how invested your employees are in their work and your business. Do they feel that they\u2019re a valuable part of a team? Do they feel connected with the business mission? Do they know how they\u2019re being evaluated? When there are clear expectations and employees understand how they can advance within the business, they are more likely to feel a higher level of engagement at work. <\/p>\n\n\n\n If you\u2019re interested in how engaged your team is in your business, there are a few areas of employee engagement<\/a> to consider. Highly engaged employees feel that they have a healthy work\u2013life balance. Their work doesn\u2019t overwhelm every aspect of their lives, but it is a valuable part of their life. Engaged employees feel that there is open communication within the organization and that setting goals is central to the work environment. When employees are involved in setting personal, team, and organizational goals, and those goals are relevant to their work, they\u2019re more likely to stay invested in the company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another element of engagement is organizational transparency. Transparency keeps them aware of what\u2019s happening in your business\u2014both the good and the bad. When they know about the company, it builds trust, creating a positive work environment and increasing employee engagement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Other aspects of employee engagement relate to employees feeling valued at work. Employees like when they can make their own decisions. They also want opportunities to grow professionally, the potential for advancement, and to be recognized for their accomplishments. Of course, solid compensation and benefits go a long way in making employees feel like they\u2019re a valued part of the team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n There\u2019s sometimes confusion between employee engagement and job satisfaction. These two terms are often used interchangeably, but they are actually quite different. According to Cambridge Dictionary<\/em>, job satisfaction<\/a> is \u201cthe feeling of pleasure<\/a> and achievement<\/a> that you experience in your job.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n If your employees feel positive about their work, that is great\u2014however, people are more engaged when they find meaning in their work<\/a>. Remember though, those feelings can change. If job satisfaction drops, employees may find less meaning in their work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are numerous benefits to higher levels of employee engagement<\/a> in the workplace. It can increase employee retention and productivity, as well as raise company profits. There are also impacts on customer service, sick leave (which costs the company money), and the workplace environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When employees are highly engaged in their work, they\u2019re more likely to stay with the business. Studies<\/a> have found that employees who are highly engaged are 87% less likely to leave their position. Since high levels of employee turnover can be very costly for a business, it makes sense to increase employee engagement. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Engaged employees are also more productive. Companies with highly engaged employees are up to 22% more productive<\/a> than companies with less employee engagement. This, in turn, can lead to more profitability for the company. Companies have shown over 20% more profit<\/a> due to employee engagement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When employees are engaged in their work, they do a better job. That means that they provide better service to their customers. When customers get better service from a company, they have a better impression of the company and customer satisfaction goes up. Companies with highly engaged employees outperform companies with low employee engagement by up to 10% in customer ratings<\/a>. This then impacts the company\u2019s bottom line. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Employee engagement impacts employee commitment to their work. When they\u2019re engaged in their work, people are more likely to go to work. Gallup polls have shown that engagement can reduce absenteeism by up to 37%<\/a>. This means companies pay less for employee sick leave and<\/em> people show up to work to do their work, which means the companies are more productive and more profitable. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Finally, employee engagement impacts the workplace environment. People who are engaged at work report less stress<\/a> in their lives. The workplace is also safer with significantly fewer workplace safety incidents<\/a> (48%). There are also over 40% fewer quality issues<\/a> in the products created in these engaged businesses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These benefits are interwoven and tied to employee engagement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As a boss, you might wonder how to assess your employee engagement. While this can be done through extensive interviews with each employee, that isn\u2019t always feasible. If you\u2019re the president of a company with thousands of employees, it\u2019s not possible to check in with each employee regularly. <\/p>\n\n\n\n For this reason, many companies choose to create employee engagement surveys that they administer regularly. This gives company leadership the opportunity to collect the data<\/a> they need to assess employee engagement, make a plan to increase engagement (if needed), and make company decisions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Your employee engagement assessment should include qualitative and quantitative data, as well as formal and informal assessments. You might administer the more formal, full employee engagement survey, like the 9-box model<\/a> once a year. Your informal data collection might occur during meetings and conversations within the workplace. You can also offer short surveys called pulse surveys<\/a> more frequently to get up-to-date information from your employees. Some companies administer these pulse surveys weekly to check the \u201cpulse\u201d of the company.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Just like at the doctor\u2019s office, checking a patient\u2019s\u2014or company\u2019s\u2014pulse is the first way to recognize a problem.<\/p>\n\n\n Creating, administering, and analyzing an employee engagement survey takes a significant amount of time and effort. For it to be valid and effective, you need to take certain steps. You might be wondering if it\u2019s worth it for your business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Do the employee surveys provide the information that you need to measure employee engagement? How do you make sure the info is valuable? What needs to be done once you\u2019ve gotten the results from the survey? <\/p>\n\n\n\n So. Many. Questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Don\u2019t worry. We\u2019ll answer them all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You might not want to hear this, but it depends. Like any survey, you want to make sure the survey assesses what you want it to assess<\/a>. When you\u2019re creating the survey, you want to make sure that you\u2019re asking quality survey questions<\/a>. We\u2019ll talk more about this later in the post. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Your survey should gather results from a true sampling of your population. If a sufficient number of people don\u2019t take the survey, your results will not be true to what your employees think and feel. While you shouldn\u2019t expect 100% participation in your survey, participation from about 75% of your employees<\/a> is a solid representation of your employees as a whole. <\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the main concerns of employee engagement surveys is that people aren\u2019t honest when completing them<\/a>. Employees might worry that their survey results will impact their evaluations or compensation, or influence their supervisor\u2019s impression of them and the potential for advancement inside the company. Some employees might feel that the survey won\u2019t change anything, so they don\u2019t bother bringing up their concerns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are certain things that you can do to address these concerns:<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first step after you\u2019ve collected your survey results is to analyze the data<\/a>. You have to understand what the data is telling you before you take action. From your questions, you could identify things that are going well within your organization. You could identify commonalities across subgroups. <\/p>\n\n\n\n After you\u2019ve identified the positives, it\u2019s essential to look for areas that need improvement. You might find that you need to talk with managers or employees to get clarification on some of the answers. You might gather enough data from your survey to identify areas to focus on in the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The next step is to develop an action plan<\/a> for employee engagement. Make sure that you identify the areas you\u2019re working on and who\u2019s responsible for the plan. There might be a small team that\u2019s in charge of creating the plan. If your business is a small team, it might be every person brainstorming together to develop a team that works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Finally, make the survey findings and action plan available to your employees. This might be a brief overview of what you discovered, areas you plan to focus on, and your plan to improve employee engagement in the future. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Important note<\/strong>: When you share your findings and action plan with employees, do so positively. There shouldn\u2019t be any sort of chastising for honest answers on the survey. If individuals feel worse off for honesty or it leads to more work for them, they won\u2019t be honest on future surveys. <\/p>\n\n\n\n If leadership accepts ownership for shortcomings\u2014instead of blaming employees\u2014required actions on the employees\u2019 part will be better received. This will go over even better if you place blame on yourself, instead of alienating your management team.<\/p>\n\n\n While Interact usually recommends 6-10 questions in a quiz<\/a>, you\u2019ll need to ask 30-40 questions in your employee engagement survey. This is long enough to cover a wide range of topics and short enough to retain employee interest. Because this survey requires a time commitment from employees, it should be offered annually. Use a shorter pulse survey to measure employee engagement more often.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When you\u2019re creating your survey questions, decide what type of questions you want to ask. You could include statements that use a Likert scale, where employees rate how strongly they agree or disagree. These statements can go a long way in measuring levels of employee engagement or disengagement. <\/p>\n\n\n\n You could include open-ended questions, where employees share thoughts in their own words. This can provide a deep understanding of what your employees are thinking and feeling. While open-ended questions can be more time-consuming to analyze, the insights they provide about employee engagement are invaluable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For more information on types of survey questions you can use, check out 10 Types of Survey Questions You Should Use for Business<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Knowing the right questions to ask in an employee engagement survey can be the most difficult part of the whole process. To help you out, I\u2019m including questions that you can use to assess several areas of employee engagement. While I\u2019m phrasing each of these examples as a question, it\u2019s quite easy to adapt them to whatever style of question you want to ask. I include different ways that you can adapt your questions in the next section about creating a survey.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Those areas are:<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are many aspects of community culture. These questions focus on the company\u2019s tone in relation to the company mission and its relationship with stakeholders. Possible questions that you can use are:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Work environment can go a long way in keeping employees engaged in their work. These questions focus on how the employee feels about the environment and whether it\u2019s a positive place to work. I offer a few question variations among the samples here:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Communication is essential for employee engagement. How company leadership communicates with stakeholders reveals a great deal about how the company communicates as a whole. Here are some examples of communications questions to ask on your employee engagement survey:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Individuals are more likely to stay engaged when they feel challenged. This could relate to professional development or advancement within the company. Some questions you might include are:<\/p>\n\n\n\n When employees are given recognition for positive work performance, they are likely to feel valued. The questions below focus on the different forms recognition and rewards can take:<\/p>\n\n\n\n However you choose to structure your questions and whichever ones you choose to include, you\u2019ll be able to assess the current state of your employee engagement and know where you need to focus for improvement.<\/p>\n\n\n Since there are several steps to setting up your employee survey in Interact, I\u2019m going to walk you through the whole process. You don\u2019t have to figure it out on your own!<\/p>\n\n\n\n To create your employee survey in Interact, first decide what type of quiz<\/a> you prefer. While lead generation quizzes are often personality quizzes, a scored quiz<\/a> is a better option for an employee engagement survey. This type of quiz allows you to weight answer choices, and the quiz automatically calculates employee engagement levels according to the categories you set. <\/p>\n\n\n\n To set up your quiz, go to the Interact dashboard and choose \u201cCreate a Quiz.\u201d From there, decide if you want to begin with a quiz template or create a quiz from scratch. Quiz templates are a great place to start because they are sorted into categories. Interact offers more than 50 different quiz template categories, ranging from Lifestyle to Holiday to Food and Drink.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For your employee engagement quiz, you might choose either the Career category<\/a> or the Self-improvement category<\/a>. Then, pick one of the many quiz templates available that best matches your topic and the number of questions you want to ask.<\/p>\n\n\n Many of the quiz templates are Personality quizzes, but that\u2019s not a problem. You can easily switch to a Scored quiz at the bottom left of whatever quiz template you choose. When the pop-up appears, choose the Scored quiz. Because it deletes all of the answer correlations, you have to confirm that you want to switch before you can proceed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You\u2019re now ready to change the title and quiz description to match your survey. Let your employees know what to expect from the quiz and why you\u2019re requesting that they take it. You can include an image or use a text-only cover.<\/p>\n\n\n Once your cover is ready to go, add questions to your employee engagement survey.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are a few different ways to phrase questions to collect employee feedback. You could ask only one type of question or use multiple question types in your quiz. You can organize your questions around the different topics listed in the question section above or intermix them to keep your audience engaged. Your survey setup is completely customizable. <\/p>\n\n\n\n One option is to set up your questions with a modified Likert scale, where you make a statement and offer answer choices of Strongly Agree, Somewhat Agree, Neutral, Somewhat Disagree, and Strongly Disagree. For example: <\/p>\n\n\n\n I clearly see how my day-to-day responsibilities align with the company mission.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Then the survey-taker selects from the five answer choices according to how they feel about that statement.<\/p>\n\n\n When you add a question into Interact, set the answer scores for each answer. This is how your survey will tabulate your employee scores. Above the answer choices, you\u2019ll see the option to \u201cSet Answer Scores.\u201d When you click that, the pop-up opens with the different answer choices. Assign a value to each choice based on how you want them scored.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Notice how I give 5 points for Strongly Agree all the way down to 0 points for Strongly Disagree. <\/p>\n\n\n This does not mean that any person who chooses that answer gets the answer \u201cwrong.\u201d It means that their points total will be significantly lower if they select several of those answer choices. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Another option is to have your employees choose which statement they agree with the most. You can include two opposing statements like \u201cI feel free to share my thoughts and ideas at work\u201d or \u201cI do not feel free to share my thoughts and ideas at work.\u201d The first statement might get 5 points and the second statement might get 1. You could also include more statements that your survey-takers have to choose from. For example:<\/p>\n\n\n\n The answer scoring for these might be A – 5 points, B – 3 points, C – 1 point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Other options for your survey questions are creating job satisfaction questions with ratings of 1 to 5 or agree\/disagree questions. You might include a question like \u201cOn a scale of 1 to 5 (1 being the lowest), how satisfied are you with the level of collaboration within your team?\u201d Another survey question might be a true\/false question like \u201cThe bonus structure within the company motivates me to work to earn the bonus.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n You can also include multiple-choice questions that give your employees the opportunity to answer situational workplace questions. Providing multiple answers of varying degrees of engagement allows you to identify where employees are in their engagement. Again, it is essential that the employee engagement survey is anonymous, so your employees feel free to answer truthfully. In the example below, note how the top answer choice is the most engaged and the bottom answer choice is the least engaged. Don\u2019t forget to assign a point value for each answer based on the levels of engagement!<\/p>\n\n\nWhat employee engagement is<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
What employee engagement is not<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Why employee engagement matters <\/h3>\n\n\n\n
How to assess employee engagement<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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The effectiveness of employee engagement surveys<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Do the surveys provide the data you need to measure employee engagement?<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
How do you make sure the information you gather is valuable?<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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What needs to be done once you\u2019ve gotten the results from the survey?<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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Types of employee engagement survey questions to ask<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Questions you can ask to measure employee engagement<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Company culture<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Work environment<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Communication<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Opportunities for growth<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Recognition and rewards<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Create an employee engagement survey with Interact<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"quiz](\"https:\/\/lh5.googleusercontent.com\/sl2tvZ3Xxg6zY7wr-cUAbuXb4zes0pHcKiTtC5H3kIlPdeURUHwb60WOdEfQSIvpOEa9uOTVmnTzCr6uSdr4ayNe57kFvMAtx1aTLfjXwoWIHXmHaS3cLcucoHoAsQN5qK37jCwd\")
![\"employee](\"https:\/\/lh6.googleusercontent.com\/blG-vAU4o8kdO6qz8EV64pffmOgN9m9jEQoSbq2s_irlzaMH0ib6ObFmb1zBJrQjLUkfobgHr5Xx-bv3XddJATUiaJ8tnFMYfCpD771c9AJS9rlGmozCQQQ1gtUTOk5gTdna8r5n\")
Adding survey questions <\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"quiz](\"https:\/\/lh5.googleusercontent.com\/LVnwKfU5Fk9X9wiutdtijVuC3Wcbovo1pM8h72k9yVb4pW3t8W8FnWZDB_98vsuKu5mhG3wBf31WX5tNXhpBvNlWvxyMo5KmaZOvVIdep3ElyWez3H4oqLXJS8HWf4oeDh3pYv1U\")
![\"setting](\"https:\/\/lh5.googleusercontent.com\/EzL6kv4fc_lCsogzeVFAbO21WA3fjEX5vKgxBzVqQ4XeVrrrLkPP1EMej1wnnVpRvZlvnF-HuwNNj0VrJhh_OR7PyVljta4PUpoaPmdk6_IQkuD2QEkuuLlyubdLIANPuhin7ixn\")
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![\"employee](\"https:\/\/lh5.googleusercontent.com\/leIPdX0-qAKWjCea-5oyuwNVw_ksZOZXM2YeBfqrxQi-PHICZB1xRcjv759ftsoKvfqUqfEhBChnrTCJAkehAUcfnyJZqDL9vMLMporYv1t5h4WGjCyPg_fGlQihd_VfYQMmj9B2\")
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n![\"make](\"https:\/\/lh4.googleusercontent.com\/KKi8Q039SVJu8VihXpec0JZ9qn8imG9GrJy9GmyULL6f7xTeHX59hnlFHuPbG08URLBARjYbq-22nu05KEbiAb5We7y0LM57ZXPx6EZVKa-ZDuU553GaZOmcbMLeq9_OvQd3rHfa\")
<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n![\"how](\"https:\/\/lh5.googleusercontent.com\/P7BNGT00s3pLRYeEzyU58hp9WsKryQMeIue-pmkwC3GUnzBJH3Fq1Dy3eBNfPb4P9Vqpu_xVKULDtthjN_8_W2FZIv3cCdFH2OWiZGl4P8G4ai-aa3IDYoVgllUvze8VdDiG54gk\")
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n![\"how](\"https:\/\/lh4.googleusercontent.com\/NgmkiXeLvtjSJbt32a3m2Klt8Hkyls3SmLI4ETKPl5s3Qc5ZNHB3qy3c4uCpMN5beGU3E19E_rBMcXKOHF4IVLoyH6eJIRa8VdOPX-443UVkAqf1omy_a2nIwzQrS5GmsD9FlRlY\")
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n![\"redirect](\"https:\/\/lh4.googleusercontent.com\/8IFbXJajV9dbcqiBWj02tRzxiqoc2sdziQ6Y0JZLcC7cv4T1deWuAjdb_M-HdwNlh59X3p8wjqatTsIbA_gZMEteX9KI-T4tqEoLSkg7Vr3I4QbNgGvfKd0AVkicw-4lT3ptoULT\")
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