While they may not always be at the top of business leaders’ agendas, could an employee engagement survey impact business productivity? Spoiler: the answer is yes.
The real question is how often should employee satisfaction surveys be conducted and what should we be asking?
Your people are the engine that powers your business success, no matter your industry. When your people are engaged and driven in their roles, you can expect that their performance will reflect that. In contrast, when employees lack motivation or feel disengaged from the company’s values, that’s when we can see productivity and job satisfaction decline.
The key factor in measuring how engaged employees are with their role, as well as their attitudes to the organisation, is by conducting an employee engagement survey.
The value of an employee satisfaction survey
Gathering data first-hand from your people will give you a complete picture of employee attitudes to the way the business operates and their overall job satisfaction.
Cost of doing nothing
The knock-on effect of not measuring and aiming to improve employee satisfaction can impact many elements of your business performance and company culture, often stemming from declined productivity, morale and retention.
- Disengaged employees reportedly cost UK businesses up to £340 billion a year, and US companies over $550 billion
- The CIPD reported that 2023 had the highest sickness absence rate for over a decade, with stress in the top 5 causes for both short and long-term absence
- 47% of people feel stressed or overwhelmed at work, so by identifying pressure points before they escalate, we can work to reduce these figures
Even as just a snippet of data, it is clear that measuring and monitoring employee experience is vital and cannot be ignored.
What kind of employee feedback do you need to collect?
You have options when collecting employee feedback. The level of information you need will dictate how you should approach it.
Would pulse surveys or polls be the better option for gathering your employee feedback? Let’s explore the difference between the two.
If you require a quick answer to a single question, you could look into running a poll via your intranet that users can take a second to vote on when they log in. For simple closed questions or votes, you could set up a different poll each month, covering anything from light-hearted topics to checking if people know where to access important information.
When more detailed information collection is necessary, a well-constructed employee engagement survey is the better option. You can build these with ease directly within your intranet. Add as many sections and employee satisfaction survey questions as required, and tailor different parts to specific teams, departments, or project groups to ensure your employee surveys are accurate and relevant to each working environment.
Is an annual survey enough?
The extent to which you should conduct employee engagement surveys will in part depend on the industry you are in and the average turnover within your company. After all, if certain departments have a high turnover, it is unlikely that you will get feedback from some employees more than once if you only run it once a year.
If, however, retention is high in other departments, anything too regular may feel like bombardment, and may not give you enough time to action improvements before asking for feedback again.
This is where tailored feedback and different formats of surveys and polls come into action. A combination of both over time is likely to provide the ideal balance between useful data capture and overdoing it.
Building an employee engagement survey
We explain employee engagement surveys and their importance, purpose and even provide some sample questions in this previous article. For today, we will go into further detail on how to collect the right data to enable you to take action.
Let’s start with the obvious, there is no point in conducting an employee engagement survey as a tick-box exercise if you won’t take the time to analyse and act on the employee feedback. As such, when putting together an employee survey, ensure you are capturing the information you need.
You can do this in a variety of ways:
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Tailor questions to different teams or job roles
Toggle question visibility to ensure each person sees questions that are relevant to their department, enabling you to drill down for specific feedback on team dynamics or any sticking points to address.
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Enable employees at all levels across the business to have their say
Ensure that all staff have suitable access to take part in the employee engagement survey regardless of their location, job type, or length of service. This is particularly relevant in industries where many workers are not desk-based. Ensure your intranet is accessible to frontline staff, such as through an easy-access mobile app that they can use and provide feedback through, on the go.
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Choose answer formats that enable measurement and action
The tool you use to create your employee surveys should enable various kinds of responses. From quantitative rating scales to text-based answers where staff can provide qualitative feedback, it helps to think ahead as to what you want to do with the data, to ensure you collect it in the right way.
Within Oak’s survey builder, there are over ten varieties of question types, from numerical ratings to drop-downs, multiple choice and written answers, which can then be personalised as necessary to support the goals of your employee satisfaction survey.
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Make it as user-friendly and straightforward as possible
To ensure that your people remain engaged with your survey, it must be easy to use. Your employees should feel like the questions they are being asked are relevant and their answers will be listened to.
It could help to create a master list of possible questions and then focus on which ones will elicit the answers that you need to get actionable responses. Doing so will remove any ‘filler’ questions that would not be a good use of your people’s time to answer.
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Utilise input from other leaders such as HR and internal comms
To encompass everything you need to gather within one employee survey, liaise with other teams or leaders, ensuring that everything is captured together. Engagement and participation rates can decline when multiple surveys are circulated in short succession, so streamlining the answers you seek should lead to higher completion rates than splitting them out.
Create pulse surveys with ease using Oak
With pulse survey functionality built into Oak, you can set up automation to pre-populate your people’s personal information such as job role, location and email address, saving them valuable time to focus on the more important questions.
Drag and drop functionality makes pulling together your employee satisfaction survey super simple. Add branding and introductory messaging around the reasons for specific employee satisfaction survey questions or sections within the survey.
Once you’ve added each question, you can test it out before sharing it with the wider organisation.
Distributing the survey
When you have built your employee satisfaction survey and are confident that it looks great and each question is relevant with suitable answer options, the next step is to promote it and encourage maximum participation.
Oak has plenty of useful features to support the distribution of your employee surveys and polls, including push notifications on mobile, bringing them to people’s intranet homepage, automated newsletters that can circulate the latest updates to your people, and even auto-translation for your employees around the world.
All employee feedback can be exported or downloaded by the individuals who created the survey; the results will only be accessible to those granted access. At this point, you can start to analyse trends or common responses to help inform the future of your internal comms, employee engagement strategy, and company culture.
Level up your employee engagement insights
We have a full suite of tools to support you to understand job satisfaction and transform employee experience. Plus, you can correlate survey responses with intranet analytics to get a full picture of how your internal comms are performing. We can show you how to make the best of your intranet to achieve your employee engagement goals and stay true to your company culture.
Click below to register your interest for a free demo by our expert team and we will be in touch to arrange this with you.
