The Great Resignation is here, and it has ushered in a fundamental shift in employee attitudes toward work. People are no longer content with a workplace that doesn’t inspire, motivate, or challenge them — and who can blame them?
Employees have greater choice than ever before over where they work, thanks to the rise of remote work. This, combined with a focus on well-being and work-life balance, means that employee retention can be a struggle.
Luckily, asking for employee feedback is one of the best employee retention strategies out there. There’s a simple way to integrate feedback into your company, too, with employee engagement surveys.
In this article, we’ll cover:
An employee engagement survey is one of the best ways to understand how your employees feel about their work, their team, and wider company goals. It’s a useful tool that can monitor employee sentiment and give you data to support change, improvement, and growth.
Employee engagement surveys come in different types and formats. A classic engagement survey often features 25-50 questions and is sent out every quarter or year. These long surveys are one of the most popular ways to get answers from your team members, but there are more engaging (and productive) alternatives.
You could also run pulse surveys. These are shorter surveys that you send out more frequently, which are especially helpful in monitoring changes in sentiment and engagement levels over time.
At Polly, we can help you run both types of employee surveys through Slack or Microsoft Teams.
Whether you’re planning a pulse survey or a more in-depth questionnaire, your survey should be:
Most people aren’t excited to fill in a survey, but with a little help you can turn an arduous task into a short and super-engaging feedback experience. The better your survey is, the more likely you will get the results you need.
Employee engagement surveys give you feedback straight from the most important resource you have — your employees. Done well, employee surveys present you with a highly effective way to listen to and understand your employees’ concerns, so you can act on their valuable input. It’s employee listening at scale. Plus, with tools like Polly, you can send anonymous surveys that help your team members feel comfortable giving honest feedback.
Quarterly surveys and pulse surveys are incredible tools to help you measure employee engagement. Not only that, you come away with actionable insights that you can use to guide real change.
Employee engagement surveys are worth investing in. A well-designed survey can help you:
Employee engagement surveys bring you useful insights and feedback that you can use to help shape the direction of your business. While often considered to be resource-intensive, Polly’s employee engagement features help you spend less time preparing and sending employee engagement surveys — freeing you up to focus on making change a reality.
To get useful data and results, you have to ask the right questions. Consider your goals, think about your audience, and create questions that help you get feedback on the areas that matter most.
In an employee engagement survey, it’s common to find questions that cover topics like:
Here’s how to take some of those topics and build practical, theme-based questions to measure employee engagement through surveys, polls, and informal feedback.
Pulse surveys are an ideal way to check in and see how your team members feel about things. Offer a handful of these easy employee engagement statements alongside multiple choice answers so you can monitor trends and change over time.
You could ask your team members to rate their experiences using thumbs-up and thumbs-down emojis, various smiley faces, or by choosing words like “mostly,” “rarely,” and “sometimes.” Take a look at our remote insights pulse survey template to see some of these survey questions in action.
A must-have for any employee engagement survey is a series of questions about employee satisfaction and happiness. Ask these questions to help you understand your team members’ thoughts on topics like their general well-being at work, work-life balance, and team relationships.
So much of your employees’ experience in the work environment comes down to alignment with your company goals and how they feel about leadership. Check in with your team members on how they feel about these key topics with thought-provoking questions:
Professional development and career growth are hot topics for most people. Ask these questions to help you discover what your employees’ goals and aspirations are, so you can develop resources and strategies to help them.
Some questions just don’t fit into a box. Take inspiration from these open-ended questions to uncover more ideas, suggestions, and feedback from your employees.
Once you’ve analyzed the results from your employee engagement survey, put that data and feedback to work by making positive changes.
The exact actions depend on your survey results, but you might be inspired to:
Whichever changes you plan to make, the key is that you actually make changes. Your team members will notice if you don’t, and as a result, they may be less likely to take part in future feedback surveys. Listen to feedback, analyze results, and then move with confidence in the right direction.
With the right questions and the right tools, running successful employee engagement surveys feels easy. Review our question ideas above, set your survey goals, and invest in an employee feedback tool like Polly to help you drive engagement.
Employee engagement surveys are just a small part of creating engaging, positive experiences for your team members. Explore our onboarding, feedback, and employee engagement features to find out why companies love Polly for HR professionals.