Employee engagement surveys: what questions to ask and why

17 min read
Want to find out how to boost engagement while reducing attrition? Then go straight to the source: your people. Here’s some tips for creating an employee engagement survey, the questions you need to ask, and a checklist to get started right away.

Your company’s financials have never looked better, but there’s word of multiple employees submitting their notice. What’s going on? The last all-employee survey (from, er, 2020) didn’t hint at any issues or point to employees planning to leave. And yet, morale has dipped. If only there was a way to ask employees how they’re feeling about their work… Enter the employee engagement survey – a comprehensive tool for assessing point-in-time employee sentiment, collecting data, and implementing actionable insights. Of course, it doesn’t take a dip in morale or a change in leadership to want a pulse on your organisation. More and more organisations check in with their employees at regular intervals to ask questions about what they’re thinking – upping the once-annual frequency to bi-annual, quarterly, or even monthly employee engagement surveys. Haven’t designed an employee engagement survey before? Here’s what you need to know to create one for your company. Want to gauge your employee engagement now? Download our free template.

What is employee engagement?

Put simply, engagement is how someone thinks, feels, and acts to help their organisation achieve its goals. An employee engagement survey, then, measures the engagement of your people so that you can analyse the data and take action to improve employee engagement levels. Hub Article: Become an expert with our Ultimate Guide to Employee Engagement

Employee engagement: the stats bit

According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace just 20% of the global workforce felt engaged in 2020. That’s down from 22% in 2019 (blame the COVID-19 pandemic) but a considerable improvement on 12% in 2009. But improvement or not, these stats mean that a whopping 80% of the world’s employees are not engaged at work. And because employee disengagement impacts business performance, retention, and workplace culture, it’s essential that organisations address the issue if they are to remain productive and competitive. Companies with a highly engaged workforce are: 21% more productive, 22% more profitable and score 10% higher customer ratings, with fewer negative business outcomes such as absenteeism, accidents, and quality defects:

Why are employee engagement surveys essential?

1. To measure how engaged your employees are: how happy, interested, and enthusiastic they are, and which factors make them feel this way (or not).
2. To give employees a voice: so that they can comment on issues, company culture, give suggestions, make observations, and feel heard.
3. To increase engagement: You may have high employee satisfaction scores, but you can always make improvements. Employee feedback tells you where those experience gaps, however small, are.
4. To encourage business growth: Feedback from employee engagement surveys can pinpoint areas of the business where you can make improvements.

Conducting employee engagement surveys step by step

1. Start with survey design

Designing an effective employee engagement survey requires careful thought to return the best possible results and data. To start, keep your survey structure simple and intuitive. Employees will need to understand how to answer the questions and your managers will need to understand how to read the report. Your goal is for as many employees as possible to understand and act on the results of your engagement survey.

Here’s what else you’ll need to think about before you get started:

• Decide whose input you need to include and whose input you don’t need (manage expectations by explaining why you are not consulting them).
• Set clear deadlines and turnaround times right from the start
• Ask participants to let you know upfront if they cannot meet the timeframe, so you can assign someone else
• Establish one person for the final sign-off, and make it clear to everyone in the sign-off process that when they say it’s final, it’s final
• Distinguish ‘nice to have’ questions from ‘must have’ questions
• Avoid designing your employee engagement survey by the committee

2. Devise questions to ask your employees

Your employee engagement survey should not only help you solve a problem at your organisation, but also point to what you’re doing right in the eyes of engaged employees. To accomplish this, you need to be sure that your questions are going to deliver useful insights into their employee experience.

If you’re starting to worry about formulating the right employee engagement survey questions, don’t. Designing your own employee engagement survey means that you don’t have to ask a question in a certain way to fit into a particular model – every question can be designed to be 100% relevant to your organisation, which can help make your survey shorter and easier to digest.

Your questions should cover three key areas:

Employee engagement

These questions go at the front of your survey, and measure: intent to stay, work involvement, discretionary effort, pride in the company, and willingness to recommend the organisation.

Core themes

These ask about the conditions that might cause (or detract from) employee engagement with questions about autonomy and empowerment, career progression, collaboration, communication, leadership, recognition, resources, strategy, management support, and training and development.

Additional themes

Depending on what’s happening in your company or market at the time, you might also want to ask about additional topics. In our employee engagement survey template you’ll find some additional ones you can include. Try to avoid throwing them all in, and only ask them if they’re relevant to prevent your engagement survey from becoming too unwieldy.

3. Identify the themes you want to measure

Your next step is to identify the themes you want to measure, and then create employee engagement survey questions that support those themes. As a rule of thumb, aim to ask 30-50 employee experience-related questions. Remember to include a way to record demographics, too.

Tip: In line with the industry standard, we recommend that employee engagement surveys use a 5-point Likert scale for all items:

• Agreement Scale: Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree
• Rating Scale: Very Good to Very Poor

Examples of great employee engagement survey questions

These effective sample employee engagement survey questions will help you to distinguish the current employee satisfaction level. You’ll notice the questions cover several of the key engagement themes mentioned above.

Q1 How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with your ability to do interesting work in your role?

Q2 How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with your ability to apply your skills in this role?

Q3 How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with your current workload?

Q4 How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with your opportunities for career progression?

Q5 How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with the physical environment at your workplace?

Q6 How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with your relationship with your manager?

Q7 Overall, how satisfied or dissatisfied are you with your current employer?

Examples of poor employee engagement survey questions

The point of employee engagement survey questions is to achieve accurate responses and a high employee feedback response rate. By including questions that are obscure, too difficult to answer, too demanding, or too personal, you risk your survey being abandoned or discredited. Some terrible questions about employee experience we have seen include:

Q1 Does traveling for work affect your relationship with your partner (if you have one)? Far too personal and intrusive!

Q2 Does your manager appear to favour some employees over others? Who? Employees will be too afraid to answer this and unwilling to snitch on colleagues

Q3 What has been your experience of working with the company over the last year? Where to begin with this? Do you want an essay? Far too long and demanding.

Q4 On a scale of 1 to 10 how fairly do you think your manager treats the team? (1 being extremely unfairly, 10 being very fairly) Fairness is a subjective concept, particularly when you are being asked to answer for other people as well here, and impossible to pin on a scale of 1 to 10. There’s no definite answer, therefore a pointless question.

Q5 What KPIs do you think we achieved B2B in the YTD? Just what does this mean? (Translation: what key performance indicators do you think we achieved business to business in the year to date?) Avoid jargon and acronyms in your surveys, although even without the acronyms this is a pretty poor question.

Your employee engagement survey checklist

Every organisation will have its own needs when it comes to assessing employee engagement. To expedite the process, we’ve created a survey template and outlined the steps to take to get your employee engagement survey up and running.