Employee Engagement Surveys

Engaged employees are loyal to their organisation, committed to their work, and actively seek to contribute to the success of the business.

With the sudden onset of working from home, many companies are seeking to understand the true engagement and job satisfaction of their staff.

Employee Engagement Surveys allow your business to gather insight as to what is important to your people, what they feel needs improving, and consider an action plan to address the key issues requiring attention such as retention, productivity, succession planning, or absenteeism.

We have set out the top five items to consider when rolling out your first Employee Engagement Survey:

1. How will you ensure anonymity?

Surveys give employees a chance to feel heard. However, unless you can ensure the safety of anonymity, many won't participate for fear of reprisal. 

From hard copy files that can be placed into a locked box, to confidential online surveys - the key to encouraging the most honest feedback from your staff is to ensure utter confidentiality and anonymity. This is to say, employees should be provided with the opportunity to provide totally anonymous feedback in their own time. 

2. Who will participate?

Consider whose feedback is truly required. From full time employees to contract workers, who are the target participants? This answer will depend on a number of factors, and will differ from one organisation to the next.

3. How will you encourage feedback?

Advertising weeks in advance of the survey to ensure everyone knows it is approaching, and marketing this in such as way as to encourage feedback is a must. Employees should feel their opinion matters, and that management at all levels truly want to hear what they have to say. 

4. What questions will you ask?

Off the shelf engagement surveys cover a number of generic topics - training, advancement, pay and benefits, the work environment, etc. However the beauty of creating your own survey is that you can design this to include what is truly important to your business specifically. 

It is important to take the time to consider the most meaningful questions before you launch your survey. This should include discussions with your middle management team, who are on the ground every day, and likely to be already aware of the greatest issues impacting staff.

5. What do you plan on doing with the results? 

a) What will be the process of agreeing an action plan to address key issues appearing in the results of the survey, and:

- Is there a realistic budget to support actions required?

- How will the middle management team be included in planning discussions? 

- How will you measure results of the survey against your business objectives?

b) How and when will the results of the survey and accompanying action plan be communicated to employees?

c) How often will the survey be repeated to gauge any changes in engagement over time?

At HR Support Ireland, we can work with you to design a bespoke Employee Engagement Survey that truly touches on all areas you require feedback on. We can also support you through designing an effective action plan to increase engagement and job satisfaction. 

Call us today for an obligation-free discussion on how we might be able to assist.