Unpacking Engagement Surveys: Revealing the Pulse of Your Organization

When we talk about driving a high-performance workplace culture with strong employee engagement levels, we often discuss the importance of managers giving continuous and valuable feedback to their teams. However, creating avenues for employees to provide feedback back to their leaders and the company is just as critical in improving business outcomes. One effective way of measuring employee sentiment is through engagement surveys. While initiating surveys within your team might feel daunting initially, the insights gained about individual engagement levels, motivations, and satisfaction are invaluable. To be clear, an engagement survey is certainly not a “check the box” HR initiative; you and your managers must be committed to reviewing, reflecting, and acting on the feedback you receive.

If your organization is new to the practice of measuring engagement and you are considering your first step, you will want to determine a cadence for the survey. A biannual or quarterly survey is often a good place to start. Some teams choose to gather feedback more frequently, such as monthly, via a briefer “pulse” style survey. Regardless of how often you select to carry out the survey, its effectiveness hinges on the execution of the overall process.

There are various ways you can administer your survey and collect feedback. If you have a smaller team, for instance, you can use Google Forms for full customization of your questions and general style, though it is quite manual to do so. As you grow, you may want to instead tap into the features of your HRIS or other culture platform. Systems such as BambooHR and 15Five offer either core or add-on tools for measuring employee engagement. Depending on which platform you use for your engagement survey, you may have varying levels of customization capabilities for the questions you ask. Lengthier surveys can be segmented to assess satisfaction across various workplace initiatives and programs including benefits, compensation, career growth, learning opportunities, management effectiveness, and more. Or, you can simply ask what your employees like most about working at your company, and alternatively, what they would like to improve or change.

Once the survey is closed and the feedback collection step is completed, it is time for a thorough review of the results. Constructive feedback may not always be fun to read, but this firsthand knowledge will enable leaders to identify areas of strength and areas needing improvement within the organization. Remember, each person in your company is shaping the organizational culture and workplace experience, so it’s important you consider their perspectives.

To encourage continued transparency and open communication, the survey follow-through may be the most important part of the entire process. Be ready to share a summary of the survey, including high-level trends and follow-up action items. Your employees will continue to give feedback if they are confident they are being listened to.

No matter where you are in your employee engagement survey journey, we’re here to help! At PeopleWise, our team can support you from building the survey to crafting the follow-up communication, ensuring you are promoting a positive and productive culture every step of the way.