Quick! What are your employees’ most pressing concerns, values, and needs? Are they engaged in the mission, vision, and values of the company? Do they have ideas that can help improve the bottom line?
If you hesitated in answering any of these questions, it might be time to implement a strategic and proven system – an employee engagement survey. Many managers find surveys a beneficial way to gauge the climate of their company’s culture.
What is the Purpose of Employee Engagement Surveys?
Companies that have a high level of employee engagement retain employees, and the converse is also true. Surveying employee engagement helps managers understand the expectations of employees and create an environment in which they can be successful.
Satisfied employees lead to a satisfied customer base and, as a result, a more productive and profitable organization. On the other hand, unengaged employees stick to doing the “status quo” and bare minimum, while highly engaged employees will go above and beyond expectations to drive your organization forward.
Most executives and managers know when employee dissatisfaction is peaking. While they may know action is needed, they miss the mark on exactly what to do. Creating an environment to increase customer and employee satisfaction, and ultimately, the bottom line, is elusive for many companies. Satisfaction or engagement surveys like the Gallup Q12 can help managers gain an understanding of the scope of dissatisfaction.
Example Employee Engagement Survey Questions
If you choose to create your internal survey, you can ask more specific questions that target particular shortcomings your organization is facing or identify areas of improvement. Employee engagement survey questions can be open-ended or answered within a 1 to 5 scale, for example.
These are a few example questions to help frame your survey.
- Why did you join the organization?
- Which attributes do you value in leaders and other employees?
- Which company values most resonate with you and your immediate management? Which are lacking or not present?
- Do employees near you consider leaving the organization?
- What is the level of satisfaction with employee compensation?
- How can employee satisfaction be enhanced? Ask if options such as flextime, remote work, employee recognition programs, etc. are important.
- What can be done to increase your company’s customer service levels? Customer satisfaction? Customer loyalty, productivity, quality, or profit.
- What can be done to make the organization more competitive? Is it increasing employee satisfaction or engagement? Level of customer service? Productivity? Change in management?
- Are your management’s expectations of you clear or realistic?
- How would you rate your opportunities to grow professionally at work?
- How comfortable are you sharing your opinions with colleagues and management?
- Do you feel cared for as a person beyond your professional role?
It is important to not only distribute and collect surveys but also to implement ideas and suggestions. Creating a more engaged workforce is not a new idea. It’s an old idea gaining traction.
What to Do With Employee Engagement Survey Results
After completing a round of surveys, there are several options for what your organization can do with the results.
- Share the results internally with employee participants and executive leadership. This can be through a simple email, a company-wide presentation, or a printed copy for all to reference.
- Create a follow-up plan of action. After analyzing results, the next step is to naturally take action to make improvements across the organization. Involve relevant management to ensure the right people’s voices are heard and incorporated into the decision-making process.
- Share the results externally. Does the analysis of results reveal positive trends across your organization? These golden nuggets of information are great additions for any employer branding. Even if you find areas of improvement, publicly announcing that your organization is striving to improve them (i.e., diversity, work-life balance, etc) is also an important aspect of your brand.
- Hold follow-up meetings to expand on survey questions. After finding trends across responses, you may need additional insight before creating a plan of action. Hold focus groups with randomly selected employees to hear more in-depth responses.
- Plan for future surveys. You won’t know if you’re improving unless you continuously check in with employees. See how trends change after implementing policy and process changes.
How to Incorporate Employee Satisfaction into Your Employer Branding
Engaging and retaining the best and brightest employees is important to the bottom line, which is why employers are asking for feedback via surveys. Not only is the engagement of current employees critical to your bottom line, but so is the recruitment of quality talent.
BestCompaniesAZ works with organizations across Arizona to improve employer branding through strategic initiatives and fill in-demand positions across various industries. Contact BestCompaniesAZ to see how we can work together.
