If you wish to find out whether your team is comfortable and appreciates their work environment promptly and effortlessly, do an employee engagement survey. A framework for improvement and a good guide for reassessing employee engagement can be created monthly or yearly.
This article will demonstrate how you can do an employee engagement survey at your small business covering every aspect. We will also give tips on how to manage the results.
You can get an idea of the questions by reading our template. This template will help you have insight into employee commitment.
If you need a better system for keeping a record of HR? Justworks offers a full series of services regarding payroll, benefits, and HR so you can handle everything within one easy-to-use platform.
Free Employee Engagement Survey Template
We have designed a short 10-question template that can apply to any organization in any industry. These 10 questions should be helpful for your business regardless of your size or structure.
Instructions: Please fill out this survey to the best of your capability.
The ABC Company will utilize this survey to design benchmarks and recognize areas that we can develop. The information gathered will be classified as anonymous and will only be used for the aforementioned purpose. Please feel free to write in the comments about any particulars or ideas that you wish to add, which may help the survey.
Please note that for all questions, the following scale is applicable:
1 = not at all/never/no/poor
2 = rarely/probably not/not great
3 = sometimes/occasionally/maybe/decent
4 = often/most likely/pretty good
5 = all the time/very much/yes/awesome
Question 1: On a scale of 1 to 5, how content are you at work? _________________________
Comments: _________________________________________________________________
Question 2: On a scale of 1 to 5, how likely are you to leave our company if you were to be given a 10% raise from another company? ______________________________________________________________
Comments: _________________________________________________________________
Question 3: Would you introduce someone to work here? (Yes/No/Maybe) ____________________
Comments: _________________________________________________________________
Question 4: The last time you finished a big project, did you receive any recognition? (Yes/No/A Little Bit) _________________________________________________________
Comments: _________________________________________________________________
Question 5: On a scale of 1 to 5, what would you rate our company’s culture? ______________
Comments: _________________________________________________________________
Question 6: On a scale of 1 to 5, how would you rate your colleagues and fellow team associates or peers? ___________________________________________________________________
Comments: _________________________________________________________________
Question 7: On a scale of 1 to 5, how would you rate the aptitude of management? _____
Comments: _________________________________________________________________
Question 8: On a scale of 1 to 5, what would you rate your work-life balance? ______________
Comments: _________________________________________________________________
Question 9: On a scale of 1 to 5, how likely is it that you would recommend our company’s products or services, or the company in general, to a friend? __________________________
Comments: _________________________________________________________________
Question 10: On a scale of 1 to 5, how important do you feel at work? _____________________
Comments: _________________________________________________________________
If you would wish to make specific comments on things we can improve upon, or things that you like about working here at ABC, please do so here:
___________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________
Top 20 Additional Employee Engagement Survey Questions
We have listed down 20 more employee engagement survey questions that can be attached to your survey and can substitute one of the template questions. If you like the contents of the questions below better, then you may edit it to your liking: (i.e., “Do you envision yourself working here one year from now” versus Question 2 of the template “On a scale of 1 to 5, how likely would you leave for a 10% raise from another organization”).
- On a scale of 1 to 5, how much possibility do you have for professional growth in this organization?
- On a scale of 1 to 5, how well do you think we service our clients?
- Do you have a complete understanding of your career or promotion path?
- Hypothetically, if you planned to quit tomorrow, what would your motivation be?
- If you were given the opportunity, would you re-apply to your current job?
- Do you envision yourself working here one year from now?
- Do you think the leadership team takes your feedback sincerely?
- Do you feel like the management team here is genuine?
- On a scale of 1 to 5, how comfortable do you feel presenting feedback to your supervisor upwards?
- Do you believe we continue to live authentically by our organizational values?
- Do you have fun at work?
- Do you know the strategic goals of our company?
- Do you know what you should do in your job to support the company to meet its goals and aims?
- Can you see a clear connection between your work and the company’s goals and aims?
- Are you proud to be a part of your team?
- Does your team encourage you to do your best work?
- Does your team support you to achieve your work?
- Do you have a suitable amount of knowledge to make correct decisions about your work?
- Do you have a good knowledge of informal structures and processes at the company?
- When something unforeseen comes up in your work, do you usually know who to ask for aid?
3 Basic Rules of Employee Engagement Surveys
You have to make sure you understand the basic rules for filling a simple employment survey form to get the outcomes that you require and establish trust with your employees to fill them out honestly.
Rule 1: The survey must be anonymous & inclusive
You will need to make sure you survey everyone at the company or give them a choice to participate in making sure that somebody doesn’t feel left out of the process. For a survey to have any sincerity and to maintain its integrity, it has to be anonymous. It is better to have an external online provider to handle the survey rather than an HR person.
Here are a few sites which let you generate anonymous surveys:
- Survey Monkey
- Survey Planet
- Survey Gizmo
- Fluid Surveys
Some surveys manage to blend well with social media. If you have a large employee center with a private Facebook group, you might need to pick alternatives to get a higher response rate.
The price tag can be quite high for hiring an outside consultant. You can do that if you favor not to use an online service. If you decide to use an outside consultant, we suggest posting a project with a specific budget on Upwork, Craigslist, or a different freelancer site for it to be affordable.
Rule 2: Be careful what you ask because you will get answers
If there is a point that you don’t want to know about, or maybe where you don’t want to start any objections, then don’t ask the question.
For instance, we should take question 8 in our template concerning the work/life balance. On the off chance that you are a bookkeeping firm amid a bustling season, posing this inquiry is setting you up for slanted answers or even disappointment. Around here, it’s entirely expected to work 80 hour weeks from February 1-April 15, thus opening a door about work/life equilibrium might be counterproductive. This rule correlates directly to our next one, which is arguably the most critical.
Rule 3: If you do a survey, you will need to be prepared to act on the results
If you take an employee survey, your employees will await to see results. Maybe they all requested something reasonable, like a water cooler in the office (versus having to purchase bottled water down the street). Well, guess what? They are going to discuss with each other, and they are going to know what they requested. If you take a survey and do nothing, your employee engagement survey will have the adverse effect of the benefits below and instead will cause employees to get frustrated and even decrease morale.
We recommend after the survey’s data has been gathered to do one quick win, i.e., the water cooler, and then strategically devise how to take actions on the other items that may take longer, like management coaching or work/life balance aspects. However, we also advise announcing your plan to take action to your employees so that you are held answerable and so that they know their voices were heard, which is especially valuable for morale and trust.
3 Tips for Making the Most of an Employee Engagement Survey
According to CEB research, about 80% of senior leaders consider employee engagement is important to accomplishing their business objectives, and 92% of companies administer an employee engagement survey. This means many people want to make sure they are doing the most with their employee engagement survey.
Tip 1: Take Action on the Results – A Small “Win” Immediately and Plan for a Long Term Larger “Win”
As we’ve said a few times now, and we’ll say it a few more times, you need to consider taking action. Believe in a quick win, a small thing you can do to show the team you heard them. Maybe it’s a lunch for the company this Friday to review the results, or maybe it’s that water cooler we discussed previously. Think of something that shows you heard and you care about what they said that’s $250 or less.
To show that you heard the survey loud and clear, you would have to create a long-term action plan. A plan that might mean a bigger investment or including more team members in the project.
Once you have performed an employee engagement survey once, you could engage a focus group (aka 3-5 key employees of varying levels) or get feedback from management on questions to attach to the survey. Maybe you missed the boat on a big issue or two that they desire to know about; this will also improve buy-in from all levels.
You could create a plan involving a combination of manager coaching and even implementing a performance management system if you discovered that your managers are not appreciating or praising their employees enough. You might even look at performance management software, which can be a longer-term investment to resolve the problem. This kind of change won’t happen overnight but tell your employees what you are doing and that you heard their wishes.
Tip 2: Record the Data for Comparison
Recoding the data may seem like an obvious tip, but we can’t tell you how many times we have gone to organizations, and they go, “Oh yeah, we did a survey last year. Oh wait… I have no clue where it is”.
If you have a strategy for change, make sure to record that and plan out due dates for the deliverables. Learn to register the data and to create some benchmarks and goals for improvement. You could record this in HR software, or you could record it in a normal file on your network and set an alert in your calendar to reassess every 3-6 months. I
Tip 3: Make the Survey a Repeating Event
Depending on your turnover and business patterns, you should repeat the survey repeatedly in 6 months or more or less. Like any other experiment, you need to do the survey more than once to be certain that you are getting accurate, compatible results and making sure you are progressing.
Benefits & Drawbacks of Doing an Employee Engagement Survey
This section will explain the benefits of an employee survey in some detail to give you insights into its value.
The benefits of doing an employee engagement survey might appear obvious to some. Still, they might also be a tad scary to others since it’s going to let you understand exactly what your employees think of your company.
Benefit 1: You’ll see the “Other Side of the Coin.”
Doing an employee engagement survey will get you to recognize what your employees think. If you have a lot of remote team members, or perhaps they are all in a diverse age bracket, or maybe you are on the road all the time, this can be incredibly insightful on the culture and company you are building.
Benefit 2: Pinpoint Your Organization’s Strengths and Weaknesses and Gives a Way to Change
Solely just data from the rankings of 1-5 might not give you a clear way to change; it can start to guide you in the general direction of where to start.
Your employee survey can also assist you in knowing about your company’s strengths and weaknesses. For example, if you ask question 9 about referring associates in your company’s services or products, you might know a lot about your employees’ opinions of your products, which could even start marketing campaign tweaks or retargeting campaigns.
Most surveys at companies should show trends in fields you can improve or that you should keep as is. The commentary and suggestions can provide many ideas on what that path to change might look like. Finding out the areas your company surpasses at versus could improve upon can also let you explore with performance management, or even with your recruitment strategies.
For example, when I served as an in-house HR Manager, we did an employee engagement survey to take the temperature on morale and if people were looking for another job after 2 years of no pay raises. One result of the survey was that people missed having interns around with their big ideas and fresh energy. So, we started an internship program to begin that summer, and, apart from saving us $40K in labor costs, it perked up a lot of the managers and made for quite a pleasant summer for everyone at the office.
We highly advise involving your employees in the process to buy into the development once you begin to understand this path of change. Ensure they know you are taking action on the survey, which we addressed is the key part of taking one.
Potential Drawbacks to an Employee Survey
Though the benefits are great for a survey, it’s essential to acknowledge that there can be disadvantages from doing one, which are:
Drawback 1: You don’t have the budget for the changes they want
Maybe your amazing team makes recommendations like “catered lunch every day” or “unlimited expense accounts for client dinners.” This is one of the dangers of an employee survey where they make suggestions that are in no way, shape, or form within your budget.
So what do you do? You negotiate. When you build your plan of action, come up with a smaller version of their suggestions (catered lunch once per month or a higher price budget for clients over a certain account threshold).
Drawback 2: You don’t have the time to take action
Maybe you do the survey and understand that you bit off more than you can chew, and you don’t have the time for this. Whatever you do, don’t back down from this- DELEGATE. Repeat after me- DELEGATE. Please take 30 minutes to look at the data and then allow your right-hand person or HR person to design the action plan and show it for your approval. Let them come up with the clarifications, the budget needed, and then they can take the ball from there. Otherwise, you risk reducing employee morale if no action is taken.
Employee Engagement Survey versus Employee Morale Surveys
There are some minor differences between an employee engagement survey and an employee morale survey.
The best way we can explain the differences is with an example:
Here at Fit Small Business, I’ll say it–we are all happy to work here, and we get along well. Employee morale is high, and I think people enjoy their work from what I can tell. We still should do an employee engagement survey because it can provide a ton of insight for our owners and provide us a benchmark to keep or improve upon.
A company where I was hired to do layoffs as an in-house HR manager was the polar opposite of this. Many people were angry, jaded, and showing up to work late or calling in sick. It was clear that employee morale was low, and I encouraged them to do an employee morale survey to see how they could improve things for the left staff.
The moral of the story is that almost every company, be it healthy and happy or unhealthy & struggling, may need an employee survey. An unhealthy and struggling company should really focus their survey on the moral aspect to not lose more people.
I Need to Improve Employee Morale
You would want to tweak your survey questions a bit to include employee morale survey questions if you realized that you are doing this survey to develop employee morale.
You should do this in 3 steps:
- Focus the questions on the employees and their inner needs (think being valued, feeling appreciated)
Focus your questions on your employees’ feelings, like feeling valued, feeling recognized, and acknowledged. Morale is not something like a water cooler; it is an intrinsic aspect of the office’s general energy and how people feel about working there.
- Hone in on improvements and the positive aspects
Try to keep the survey’s language positive- if morale is already suffering, you don’t require any more Debbie Downer language in the office. Concentrate on the positive.
- Provide options for them to choose from, especially if you are on a budget
If the funds are tight, you will still want to make changes. To help guarantee that changes are within budget, give employees specific questions with options, rather than leaving questions open-ended like in our template.
For example, you could request:
If given a choice to update the office, what would you choose?
- Weekly happy hours on Thursdays from 5-6 pm on the organization
- A fancy latte machine in the office
- A sparkling water machine to create fizzy water
- New headsets for our phones
These selections are all similar in cost, with number 4 costing the most upfront, but 1-3 will be constant costs (i.e., buying more latte pods).
The Bottom Line
We advise you to try an employee engagement survey to gain insight and great data to help you make the most of yourself as a business owner. Organize your budget and delve into the aspects you are expecting to learn out of it.