How employee surveys can help improve employee engagement

The last few months have brought tremendous change to people's personal and professional lives. While some of these changes have been quite tough, some of them have turned out to be positive. For instance, the pandemic has forced organizations across the world to switch to remote working in a matter of weeks. While the IT industry was able to accommodate this change easily, other industries faced a lot of hurdles while making this transition.

Before Covid-19, a lot of organizations in the world believed that remote working wasn’t the best choice for them. But as the pandemic forced them to make arrangements for most of their employees to work from home, leaders realized remote working isn’t as difficult as it seemed earlier. In fact, many experts believe that remote working was an unavoidable feature of the modern workplace and the pandemic only sped up the inevitable.

Taking care of employees despite the distance

Organizations trying to adapt to the remote working experience had to look for resources that would help them stay connected to their employees, and understand them better in such a situation. Previously, HRs could study the body language of their employees and talk to them directly to understand them but, this was not the option while working remotely. Each employee worked from their own homes instead of shared space like the office before. This posed a great problem for the leaders and HRs of the organizations—how were they supposed to create the same office culture as before now?

The solution to this problem is simple—employee engagement surveys. These surveys are not like the annual surveys that a lot of times seem like they are conducted for the sake of it. Employee engagement surveys are more precise. Such surveys are made available by employee engagement platforms like CultureMonkey that are dedicated to improving employee experience across organizations. And CultureMonkey’s employee engagement surveys help HRs with minimum manpower.

Making the most of employee engagement surveys

Employee engagement surveys are great tools that help organizations shape and maintain their company culture while ensuring transparency and honesty. CultureMonkey allows employees to reflect and share feedback while helping HRs and leaders measure, evaluate, and act on that anonymous feedback. CultureMonkey surveys can be customised and sent out to employees at regular intervals of time which will help HRs and leaders measure employee efficiency as well as employee experience.

While many organisations do use employee engagement surveys, they may not be using them to their potential. Just sending out surveys with bare minimum questions isn’t enough—it doesn’t help the organization or the employees. HRs must be careful while selecting the right employee engagement platform because they need a platform that allows them to send surveys to help them measure what matters to their organization.

But HRs and leaders must also know how to make the most out of employee engagement surveys. The following pointers must be remembered while conducting employee engagement surveys:

Ask the right questions

Sending surveys to employees isn’t enough. HRs must ask the right questions to the employees to get a better understanding. Generic questions aren’t the right choice in the case of employee engagement surveys because that shows management’s lack of interest in understanding their employees. Employees appreciate direct survey questions which help them share their opinions with the management easily and efficiently. Take a look at our compilation of the right questions HRs and leaders need to ask their employees.

Send surveys at the right frequency

Employee engagement surveys are meant to understand employees so they need to be sent out regularly. HRs need to make sure that the surveys are not just annual affairs but sent at least twice a month. It is important to send out surveys at regular intervals because employee experiences differ over time and a week or two can bring in a lot of changes in an employee’s life that need to be communicated with the management immediately. If HRs delay sending out surveys, then employees will fail to communicate their concerns with the management on time, which will lead to a delayed response from them. This will in turn lead to a growing mistrust in the employee's mind for their leader and organization.

Establish goals for each survey

While typical employee engagement surveys tend to contain questions that revolve around multiple factors that influence employee experience, it is also important to establish an underlying theme or goal for each survey. This helps the management and leaders drill down on the real problems employees face. The survey goals must be determined as per the reports from the previous surveys to improve the management’s understanding of the employees and improve the Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS).

Analyze the survey results

This is probably the most important step of the entire process of sending out employee engagement surveys. If leaders and HRs don’t analyze the surveys then they fail to implement the knowledge they would have gained to improve the organization. CultureMonkey sends out handcrafted reports after each survey so that the leaders can study the surveys and act on the feedback which will help them gain the trust of their employees in the long run, if not immediately.

Maintain anonymity of surveys

Employees will share their honest opinions only when all employee engagement surveys are anonymous. This is fair on their part because they want to protect themselves from possible problems at the workplace. So, leaders must ensure that their employees are aware and confident that all surveys sent out to them are completely anonymous. CultureMonkey makes this easy for the management by ensuring no individual information is ever revealed in any of the reports. One of the core values of CultureMonkey is to ensure employee anonymity in all employee engagement surveys.

As employees keep working from their homes and far away from their teams, organizations must take the advantage of employee engagement surveys to create better employee experiences despite the geographical differences.