Essential questions for your Employee Engagement Survey

Keeping track of your employees' satisfaction is key to having a productive team and to nurturing real job enrichment. Ensuring that work contentment is high has huge benefits in all areas of work, not just in quality and motivation, but also in helping reduce retention and improving overall company culture. And one of the most effective and efficient ways to do this is an employee engagement survey.

A staff engagement survey is a questionnaire you can send out to the entire team asking for their thoughts and feelings. Common employee survey topics include general impressions of work and progression, as well as things like the likelihood of recommending it to a friend. Staff engagement surveys also give a safe space for people to talk about any mounting frustrations. These are key things you want to keep on top of, as high job satisfaction can impact everything from retention to customer loyalty.

Often, a job engagement survey is anonymous, so people can speak freely in their responses. The engagement with your employee engagement survey itself is also a vital metric — if your employees aren’t comfortable sharing their thoughts, you know something is off.

A job satisfaction survey, first and foremost, should not be something that your team are likely to view as a chore, or just another thing on their to-do list (in fact, making tedious tasks like this might well negatively impact a sense of high job satisfaction). Your staff engagement survey should symbolise the company’s commitment to open communication and job enrichment, and your team should be happy and enthusiastic that their thoughts are being heard. So, here are some key tips to keep in mind:

Don’t be sending out lists of questions in a basic email that can seem more like an interrogation. Your team member engagement survey shouldn’t be overly time consuming (or guilty of a multitude of other survey sins). There are plenty of survey platforms online that make answering and analysing questions easy and engaging. Many surveys do this by asking employees to answer in a rating of 1-10 which also makes analysis efficient for you, too.

Employee satisfaction has people at the heart of it, so talk to your team like people, not like a corporate robot. Use easy and simple language that will, in turn, encourage clear and actionable answers.

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Don’t just drop generic questions into your job engagement survey. Sit down and give it some real thought. Work with leadership to discuss where you think the company could improve, and shape your questions around that. Similarly, you can use your job satisfaction survey to confirm that your perceived strengths are something your wider team agrees with.

It’s a classic corporate horror story, when a safe space becomes decidedly unsafe. If you set your survey to anonymous, keep it that way. Even if you’re able to tell who the employee is based on what they say, you should never confront them about it. The onus is on the company to take this feedback and build on it, not blame an employee for sharing it. Team member engagement surveys should always be confidential and treated with professionalism and respect from everyone involved.

Again, answering an employee engagement survey should be seen as a positive thing, an open and supportive forum. A deadline also sends a clear message that the feedback will be collected and considered (and not a digital equivalent of a suggestion box that goes unopened). So, don’t set unrealistic deadlines and don’t make demands. Do set a deadline well in advance though, so employees can make sure to pencil out some time to share their feedback.

You should have a basic idea of how your team is feeling, whether that’s from formal catchups, casual chats in the kitchen, or the general vibe you feel walking around the office. So, the majority of feedback you receive shouldn’t really come as a massive surprise. With that in mind, you should see staff engagement surveys almost as a form of user research, using team insight to confirm any theories or plans you have to make the company a better place.

For example, if you suspect productivity has fallen due to inflexible work hours and are prepared to change this but aren’t quite sure which new work pattern is suitable, then shape a question around that. This way, you can get valuable opinions from the team themselves, so you know you’re headed in the right direction for high job satisfaction.

Here are some great questions or statements you can consider including in your next survey:

Perhaps the most important of all employee survey topics. After all, the simplest questions are sometimes the most powerful. Don’t trap your team by making this a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ — things are always more complex than that. So do provide a 1-10 rating, and an open text field for them to share any details.

Don’t be so quick to dismiss this as a simple, subjective question. Happy workplaces and happy workers attract great talent, and can improve company reputation by placing you on ‘Best Employer’ lists.

Inclusion is vital for any thriving team. Given that 20% of workers claim to feel lonely every single day, fostering a real sense of belonging is crucial, and helps protect your employees from dealing with negative mental health or burn out.

Progression is an area that is key to many employees (and which has endless benefits to a business, too), but the manner in which someone grows and learns is unique to each person. So, these sorts of questions can help you decide where to focus your continuous learning efforts. For example, if you’ve budgeted for multiple conferences but find a significant amount of your team aren’t benefiting from them, you might consider starting a mentorship program or investing in an online learning platform instead.

From filling in the gaps in your talent pool, to finding great culture matches, LinkedIn can help you build thriving teams with the very best talent.