How engaged are my employees?
It’s a question asked by countless businesses – with good reason too. Engaged employees are likely to be more productive, more loyal, and more switched on to your overarching purpose, vision, and values. That translates to higher customer satisfaction, increased sales, and more success for your business.
So how do you monitor it? One solution is an employee engagement survey, comprising various questions that paint a picture of each employee’s engagement levels – as well as the engagement levels of your workforce more broadly.
Here’s a closer look at those all-important employee engagement survey questions…
1. Establish the Demographics
The first questions on your employee engagement survey should establish the demographics of the participants. As with most types of survey, this can help you break down the results by age, gender, job role, or even the time they’ve spent at the company.
Let’s say you’re surveying 400 employees. Hypothetically, you might find that 50% are engaged (based on a number of metrics). Not particularly helpful. But what if that figure was 80% for over 50s and just 20% for under 30s? You would get a much better idea of the steps to take to tackle that problem.
2. Company Values
After the basics, it’s time to get into the meatier questions. Firstly, consider company values. Asking employees to describe your company’s vision, mission, values, or purpose can give you a good insight into how engaged they are, as well as how well you, as a company, are communicating these things.
Employees that are truly engaged will be able to reel off the key values of your company or a brief explanation of why it does what it does. That could be environmental change, innovation, or just putting customers first. In contrast, others might simply describe what you do, or, even worse, leave it blank. This is a sure-fire sign that they don’t understand the values behind your business, and aren’t fully engaged.
3. Corporate Objectives
While company values refer to broad ideals or missions, corporate objectives are specific targets for growth or success that are established within a business. Hitting £1m turnover, winning 50 new clients a month, or taking on 10 extra staff and moving to that larger premises.
Whatever it may be, employees are typically more engaged when they’re aware of these objectives. Including questions about corporate goals, short-term or long-term, will tell you a bit more about employee engagement. If a specific department or even the entire workforce is unsure about objectives, it probably means engagement is low.
4. Individual Roles
As well as having objectives that the whole company works towards, it’s important that employees understand their individual roles. This covers both their individual goals and KPIs, but also their role within the aforementioned corporate objectives.
Firstly, do they know what’s expected of them? Questions about their goals day-to-day and week-to-week can show how engaged they are with their own performance.
On top of that, your employee engagement survey can ask how they think their role contributes to broader corporate objectives. This is a real eye-opener for employee engagement, as engaged employees will have a much better understanding of how their role – whether it’s a customer service assistant, sales representative, warehouse picker and packer – fits into the bigger picture.
5. Personal Development
It’s one thing to understand your role. But it’s another to feel like it’s going somewhere. According to go2HR, a whopping 40% of employees who don’t receive the right training will leave their job within a year. That’s a clear sign that these employees are not engaged – and training plays a huge part in it.
One or more of your employee engagement survey questions should tackle the issue of training and development. Have you received the right training to date? Do you feel like there are opportunities for development within the company? Where would you go within the company if you wanted to discuss these development opportunities?
6. Valued and Rewarded
Feeling valued is another key factor in employee engagement. If you don’t feel valued for the work you do, are you really going to feel engaged with and connected to a company?
With this employee engagement question, you can take a direct approach, asking whether employees feel valued for their work. Or you can break it down – does their manager recognise their contribution? Do they feel like they’re fairly paid for their role? Do they feel incentivised to do more at work?
Do Employee Engagement Surveys Work?
The questions listed above will give you a good insight into the levels of employee engagement within your company. However, as highlighted in Gallup, employee engagement surveys simply measure engagement rather than improving it. In other words, they need to be part of a wider strategy.
Simply asking these questions isn’t enough to change things for the better. Neither is acting upon small issues like company values. As an example, making employees aware of values through a presentation won’t actually tackle the core engagement issue. In most cases, it’s not that employees haven’t been made aware of the company’s values – it’s that they haven’t been engaged enough to properly take them in.
The final question is one for yourself – how do you tackle the root cause and improve engagement for your employees?
Improving Employee Engagement
If your survey shows signs of poor employee engagement – or you’re just concerned that engagement is low – 3radical can help.
We help businesses and organisations improve employee engagement. Our purpose-built, award-winning softwarecan effectively gamify various aspects of employment, from recruitment and productivity to talent management and wellbeing. The result is better engagement across the board with noticeable long-term results.
To find out more, simply contact our team.