1. With a defined audience, choose your survey’s questions
Keep in mind that the questionnaire must serve your goal, giving you insights into how to tackle an issue; be specific and focus on questions related to topics you intend to act upon — e.g., eNPS, values, work environment, process and product improvements).
Don’t collect data for data’s sake. Your employees may get annoyed (and understandably so) if they have to fill in too many questions. It’s best to be thoughtful and selective with the questions you include.
If in doubt, look into best-practice questions.
2. Determine when and how frequently you’ll run the survey
Just like you shouldn’t overwhelm your people with too many questions at a time, there should be a reasonable amount of time between each survey round. Companies typically run more thorough employee satisfaction surveys annually, twice a year, or once per quarter. You just need to find out what works best for your company.
Consider that, by running recurrent surveys too further apart, you may not have the clearest picture of your company’s ebb and flow. You can even run a quick pulse survey to find out if the current recurrence works for your team.
3. Decide how long participants have to respond
Don’t set a deadline that’s too far in the future — people might take too long to respond and not be as engaged. But don’t forget that your employees are busy and have personal lives to take care of. Strive for balance (e.g., a one-week deadline, not one-month).
4. Send out reminders to increase participation
Don’t be forceful, but also, don’t be afraid to remind your team that surveys are essential so that you can work to give them the best employee experience possible.
A best-practice tip is to use multiple internal communications channels to share these reminders. E.g., company all-hands meetings, chat, email. You can also ask managers to remind their team members during 1:1s and department meetings.
Follow-up best practices for employee engagement surveys
Dig into the data
This is how you’ll understand what’s most crucial and flag key insights. Without interpreting quantitative and qualitative responses (which can be put through a sentiment analysis), you’ll have plenty of data, but no way to inform an action plan.
Share the results
Research proves that transparent communication increases engagement, so keep that in mind when deciding whether to share results or keep them confidential. At the very least, managers should have access to results to better understand how to support their teams.
There’s no need to make this overly complex. Easy-to-understand statistics and basic graphs with strong and weak points will do the job. Just don’t take too long — there’s most likely no point in presenting results from a survey done five months ago.
You may also want to include anonymous quotes from employees to show that you are listening to them. Gaining further anonymous feedback on comments you may not have fully understood can also be very helpful.
Take action
Outline specific ways the company plans to respond to the data surfaced in the survey. If possible, make your actions time-bound, so that your employees know that you aren’t making empty promises for the distant future.
💡 Interested in learning even more about employee engagement surveys? We’ve got you covered: Check out our template of 72 employee engagement survey questions. 😉
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