Employee engagement is incredibly important if you are to have a successful organization. More and more companies understand this, and now have a crowdsourcing platform in place through which you can capture ideas. This platform is also very beneficial for the dreaded employee engagement survey. Businesses often don’t like it, but it is a hugely important tool to make your organization better than it has ever been before.
What Is an Employee Engagement Survey?
An employee engagement survey is a piece of research that looks at how people feel about their company. The better they feel about it, the more engaged they are, and this means they will work harder and be more productive, because they feel they are actually a part of it. Employee engagement surveys are tried and tested methods of measuring perceptions and ideas, and they are hugely important.
Surveys do more than juts measure how your staff feels. Through their results, you can drive positive change an innovation. Employee engagement can always be improved upon, and placing the focus more on the people and less on the profits is greatly appreciated across the board.
How Do Surveys Work?
As part of your innovation platform you should have a survey available through which employees can share their thoughts and ideas, while at the same time gaining a greater understanding of their personal role. You can make this survey as long as you want to, particularly if you give your staff the opportunity to come back to it, rather than having to finish it in one go. This, in turn, allows you to ask questions about a variety of different things, gaining a true insight into what is going on with your staff members.
Of particular important is to include a number of open ended questions. This will perhaps tell you the most about how your employees are feeling, and it will immediately provide you with a fantastic idea generation area. You need to make sure that the questions are completely anonymous, so that people feel like they can share whatever they want to share.
If you are designing an employee engagement survey, you should place your focus on two things:
- How your employees currently feel.
- What you can do to make your employees feel better.
Your questions should be driven to answer those two key factors, which is how you use the survey not just as a measurement tool, but also as an idea generation tool. And you will kill two birds with one stone because, if you implement any of the ideas your employees suggest for increasing engagement, they will instantly feel more engaged themselves.
You do, however, have to make sure that you run these surveys in a way that they are most likely to be a success. This means:
- Being transparent.
- Not repeating the survey too often (every other year is more than enough).
- Using the results to uncover the message that is hidden between the lines.
- Holding group discussions, preferably through your idea management software, to improve engagement.