Why You Need An Employee Engagement Survey
When it comes to understanding your team and their needs, there are few tactics more effective than an Employee Engagement Survey. In this article, we’ll help you understand what an Employee Engagement Survey is, who should use them, and why your business needs one. We’ll also provide a solution to help you make the most out of your surveys, with the help of our experienced consultants.
Let’s start from the beginning.
What is an Employee Engagement Survey?
In order to understand the surveys, you’ll first need to become familiar with employee engagement. Firstly, let’s make an important distinction between engagement and employee satisfaction. While there can be overlap between the two, ultimately, they mean different things.
When an employee is satisfied, they may appear content and they may enjoy their time at work. This, however, does not mean that they are engaged. Engaged employees are motivated and driven because they care about their work. They strive to elevate their organisation and they are emotionally committed to their role. While an engaged employee may be satisfied, a satisfied employee is not always engaged.
An Employee Engagement Survey will help you find out how engaged your team members are, so that you can find areas of improvement. You’ll learn where the shortcomings of your team culture lie, and you will be in a position to implement a plan to make amendments.
Who is it for?
If you think that Employee Engagement Surveys are just for large companies, think again. All businesses will benefit from opening a line of communication to their employees, no matter what size. In our opinion, if you have a team, you need to conduct regular Employee Engagement Surveys. In fact, small companies often need to address culture issues sooner as they can be more detrimental to a tight team.
Why do you need them?
Did you know that when an employee is engaged, they can be up to 22% more productive? Employee engagement is the driver of success, and an engaged workforce is not only more productive, but more profitable.
Here are the reasons you need Employee Engagement Surveys:
Become an employer of choice
When you are an employer of choice, you are able to attract the best talent in your industry. Not only does it help you build up your profile, but it also helps you strengthen your reputation amongst your customer base. Plus, there is no doubt that employees stay with companies that they love and there are many benefits to retaining your staff, including reducing the cost of turnover.
Measuring the shift
It goes without saying that, recently, there has been a seismic shift in the way we work. Now that people are spending more time working from home [link to remote work article], it’s more important than ever to keep the lines of communication open. An Employee Engagement Survey can help you understand how your team is coping with remote work, how they are adapting to new working arrangements and what tools they need to be able to succeed in working from home.
Anonymity
It will come as no surprise to learn that often employees are reluctant to give honest feedback to their manager. On the other hand, when you run a survey, you encourage honesty and free up their ability to express themselves in ways they might not have otherwise. This also helps you obtain valuable feedback on what’s working and what’s not working in your business.
How can you implement it?
Most Employee Engagement surveys are large, clunky and well suited to large companies.
However, when you engage a smaller consulting firm to conduct the survey for you, you can fine tune the survey to your specific requirements. You can do this not only by size, but by industry. For example, construction companies might ask questions about safety and working on job sites, which is not relevant to a financial services company.
We work with smaller companies to tailor the questions to fit exactly what is needed, rather than a one-size fits all approach. And while most survey tools will give you the results and that’s it, we help you analyse your findings. Not only do we provide the results of your survey, we also benchmark them across other businesses – as well as giving you tailored recommendations on how to improve.
Get in touch to find out more about Employee Engagement Surveys.