What are the best practices for employee engagement surveys?

1 Define your objectives

Before you create your survey, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with it. What are the main questions you want to answer? What are the specific areas of engagement you want to assess? How will you use the results to inform your performance appraisal and feedback processes? Having a well-defined purpose and scope for your survey will help you design relevant and focused questions, as well as align your survey with your organizational goals and values.

2 Choose your method

There are different ways to conduct employee engagement surveys, such as online, paper, phone, or face-to-face. Each method has its advantages and disadvantages, depending on your budget, time, resources, and target audience. You need to consider factors such as accessibility, convenience, anonymity, response rate, and data quality when choosing your method. You also need to decide how often you want to conduct your survey, whether it will be a one-time or recurring event, and how you will communicate and follow up with your employees.

3 Design your questions

The quality of your survey questions is crucial for obtaining reliable and actionable data. You need to ensure that your questions are clear, concise, relevant, unbiased, and consistent. You also need to balance the types of questions you use, such as open-ended, closed-ended, rating, ranking, or multiple choice. You should avoid asking too many or too few questions, as well as leading, ambiguous, or double-barreled questions. You should also test your questions before launching your survey, to ensure that they are easy to understand and answer.

4 Analyze your data

Once you have collected your survey responses, you need to analyze them to extract meaningful insights and trends. You can use various tools and techniques to process and visualize your data, such as spreadsheets, charts, graphs, tables, or dashboards. You should look for patterns, correlations, gaps, outliers, and anomalies in your data, as well as compare your results with your objectives, benchmarks, and expectations. You should also interpret your data with caution and context, and avoid jumping to conclusions or making assumptions.

5 Share your results

One of the most important steps in conducting employee engagement surveys is to share your results with your employees and stakeholders. You need to communicate your findings in a clear, honest, and transparent way, and highlight the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and challenges that emerged from your survey. You should also acknowledge and appreciate the participation and feedback of your employees, and show them how their input matters and makes a difference. You should also invite them to discuss and comment on your results, and encourage them to share their ideas and suggestions for improvement.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?