Mastering Employee Engagement Surveys: Small Business Guide

Research published by the Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM) determined that high levels of employee engagement can cause cyclical success for businesses. To improve employee engagement for your business, you’ll first need to measure your current level of engagement. What better way to capture where you stand than through an employee engagement survey? 

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Employee Engagement Survey Benefits 

The cyclical nature of employee engagement described by SHRM is simple: a high level of employee engagement leads to better information and knowledge-sharing practices throughout your organization, more seamless teamwork and cooperation, and boosted employee satisfaction and retention. In turn, clients see more responsive service, higher product quality, and overall greater satisfaction with your brand as a whole. 

Ultimately, when your business is tapped into employee engagement, it can experience increased sales growth, market share, productivity and long-term profitability. It stands to reason that investing in employee engagement will yield you an ROI worth working toward. 

In this article, I’ll walk you through the first step in boosting your employee engagement: measuring where your engagement levels stand today. I’ll also show you how to increase employee engagement survey participation, and finally, let you know where to turn to for help getting started. 

Implementing an Employee Engagement Survey: Where to Start 

Employee engagement survey vendors report that surveys that are tied to your organization’s goals will earn you the most effective results. Your chief goals may be to improve client satisfaction and retention, to strengthen your company’s reputation, or to drive revenue through increased market share. 

For example, if one of your organization’s chief goals is to improve customer satisfaction, you can find out how engaged your employees are with this objective through the following agree-to-disagree scale questions: 

• On my team, colleagues frequently discuss how to satisfy customer needs. 
• My team responds to customer complaints appropriately and with a resolution mindset. 
• My team knows what we need to do to improve customer satisfaction. 

Note: Using “team” instead of “I” or “me” language can take the focus off the responding employee’s shortcomings or discomforts, garnering you a more honest and accurate picture of what needs to be improved. 

When designing your survey, having a broad perspective is key. Gather stakeholders throughout your organization to help pitch ideas and pain points to address in your employee engagement survey.

Refining the questions you’ll select to measure employee engagement effectively should involve input from various levels. Draw upon the input of high-level managers who know what the company needs long-term, managers who have a hands-on understanding of employee behavior and an experienced HR consultant who can help analyze survey questions, methods and compliance issues from an expert lens. 

RELATED: What to Do When Employee Engagement Survey Results Come Back >>

What to Measure in an Employee Engagement Survey 

As discussed, your survey should seek to understand your employees' alignment with core business objectives. However, employee engagement surveys have another key purpose: measuring the commitment, collaboration, and communication within your organization at a cultural level. While business goals may shift from time to time, these three Cs of employee engagement, if integrated within your company culture, will support the accomplishment of any goal.

Here are some ideas for measuring the presence of your three Cs: 

• Collaboration 

  • How comfortable do you feel asking your colleagues for help accomplishing a goal? 
  • In your opinion, do you have the right people working on your team? 

• Communication 

  • How likely are you to report a work-related concern to a manager? 
  • How often do you receive feedback on your work product? 

• Commitment 

  • Do you feel that you have a clear career path within our organization? 
  • Do you feel that your current job responsibilities are aligned with your personal career goals? 

How to Increase Survey Participation 

The keys to how to increase employee engagement survey participation come down to a few simple, cost-effective solutions. Here are a few tried and true participation boosters: 

• Emphasize anonymity

  One of the most common reasons for failing to complete an employee survey (or failing to complete it honestly) is the fear of repercussions from negative feedback. If your goal is to learn how to increase employee engagement survey participation, keeping your survey anonymous and highlighting that answers are private and confidential is the way to go. 

• Keep it short 

  As the American Psychological Association reports, human attention spans are shrinking. You’ll get the best feedback if you can capture employees’ attention with interesting, non-monotonous questions instead of making the survey an essay response or a chore. 

• Allow a mix of pre-set and open-ended questions 

  This will provide instant feedback (a welcome break for short attention spans) and also allow employees space to elaborate on their points of view. Measurement style, pre-set response questions are best for question sets for which you want to gauge attitudes along a scale or spectrum, i.e., extremely dissatisfied to extremely satisfied, most to least important, true or false, etc. 
  
  Open-ended questions, on the other hand, should be used sparingly. Reserve these for when your organization needs to capture feedback, new ideas, or stories from your employees' experiences. 

• Give employees the option to fill out their surveys online 

  Allowing employees to complete their surveys digitally often leads to increased participation because it's easier to access and allows for faster data analysis, as noted by the Society for Human Resource Management. Additionally, this method supports anonymity, as there's no handwriting to analyze online.  

• Incentivize participation

  Incentives for completing a survey can be small but mighty. Encourage departments or teams to compete for participation numbers by gifting the winning team with a free lunch, or use survey completions as raffle entries for a gift card or extra PTO. 

• Make certain questions optional

  While there may be questions you need responses to, a user-friendly tip is to make at least some questions optional. This simple switch offers respondents more autonomy and saves their limited bandwidth for sustained attention to the survey and elaboration on open-ended items. 

RELATED: What Is Employee Engagement & Why Is It Critical to Success? >>

Top Employee Engagement Survey Vendors: Axcet HR Solutions

Creating your employee engagement survey from scratch can be a daunting endeavor. It's important to make the most of your team members' time by putting out an effective, value-packed employee engagement survey on the first try. 

Axcet HR Solutions can help you tackle this and a full suite of other HR tasks in a compliant, efficient way. Our experienced HR consultants provide a compliance-first expert perspective honed over years of helping small businesses improve employee engagement. 

Axcet is a certified professional employer organization (CPEO) that partners with small businesses to offer cost-effective HR outsourcing and consulting options. We’d love to see how we can work together to make HR run smoother for you. Schedule a conversation with the HR experts at Axcet today.