Engagement
Employee engagement survey
This takes one sitting and covers ten questions. Before you schedule it, decide who will own the results, since in our view a survey that no one follows up leaves people worse disposed than if you had skipped the year.
Opens this survey in Gists as a draft you can edit. Sign in with Slack, Google or your work email. 30 days free. No card needed.
Should you run one this year?
If no one can commit to acting within a few weeks of it closing, wait. Huebner and Zacher's review found that the follow-up stage after employee surveys is often neglected in practice, and that research on it is thin as well (Huebner & Zacher, 2021).
We'd also avoid review season and your busiest quarter, when the answers mostly reflect the time of year.
What the evidence supports
The study everyone cites is Harter, Schmidt and Hayes: 7,939 business units in 36 companies, with unit-level engagement related to customer satisfaction, productivity, profit, turnover and accidents (Harter et al., 2002). It is correlational, and its lead author worked at Gallup, which sells engagement surveys. It's a decent reason to pay attention to engagement and a poor basis for telling your CFO that a higher score will lift profit.
Christian, Garza and Slaughter tackled the older complaint that engagement is job satisfaction with a new name. Their review found it distinct from job attitudes and related to performance beyond them (Christian et al., 2011).
Patterns you may see
A common one is high team scores with low direction scores: people like their colleagues and doubt the plan, which makes it a job for the executive team. Low manager support in a single team calls for a conversation about what that team is dealing with before you decide anything about the manager. If “Somewhere else” is rising on question 9, run the stay survey across the whole department and resist any urge to find the individuals.
If you only want a number
The recommend question is one rating and two written questions. It tracks direction well enough and tells you very little about cause.
The questions
Leadership tends to remember the written answers to question 10 long after the ratings are forgotten.
How proud are you to tell people where you work?
1 = not at all, 5 = very proud
How much do you believe in the direction the company is heading?
1 = not at all, 5 = completely
How well does your day-to-day work make use of your strengths?
1 = very little, 5 = almost fully
How fairly do you feel your contributions are recognized?
1 = not fairly at all, 5 = very fairly
Over the past year, how much have you grown professionally?
1 = not at all, 5 = a great deal
How supported do you feel by your manager?
1 = not at all supported, 5 = very supported
How well do you feel your team works together?
1 = not well at all, 5 = very well
Which areas matter most to you for the year ahead?
Pick any, optional
- Career growth
- Pay and benefits
- Flexibility
- Team culture
- Clearer direction from leadership
- Better tools and processes
- Manageable workload
If things stay roughly as they are, where do you see yourself a year from now?
Pick one
- Here, in a similar role
- Here, in a different role
- Somewhere else
- Not sure yet
If you could change one thing about working here, what would it be?
Written answer, optional
We wrote these questions for this survey and they are not a validated scale. You can edit them once the survey opens in Gists. If you copy them into another tool, check what it records about who answered.
Who sees it
Results show only when 5 or more people answer. A team below 5 rolls up into the team above it. A group is also held back when comparing it with another group could reveal a small team. HR and named leaders see every team with 5 or more answers. Each manager sees only their own team. Employees see no team scores. Themes only by default. Word-for-word answers are a company setting, off unless turned on, and employees see a notice before they write.
Before you run this
In some countries a works council or staff representatives have a right to be consulted before an employee survey, so check that with your legal adviser. Be clear that results won't feed individual performance decisions, and count this against everything else you send people this year, because too many surveys teach people to stop answering.
The decision it helps with
Which two or three areas deserve real effort next year, and which team needs help first?
Running it
One sitting, once a year, away from review season and your busiest quarter. Name the person who owns the results before it goes out, and block time for them three weeks after it closes. Each area here gets one question, so this tells you where to look, and shorter follow-up surveys tell you why.
What the results might look like
These are made-up examples to show the patterns, not real data.
Team high, direction low
4.3 on team and 2.9 on believing in the direction.
- What it means
- People enjoy their colleagues and doubt the plan.
- What it doesn't mean
- It doesn't mean the plan is wrong. It may have been explained badly, and one question can't separate those.
- What to do
- Ask executives to set out the plan and the reasoning, then listen for what people still doubt.
One team well below the rest on manager support
2.6 against a company average of 3.9.
- What it means
- That team's experience of support differs from the rest.
- What it doesn't mean
- It says little yet about the manager. New teams, recent reorganizations and workload all pull this down.
- What to do
- Have the manager's own manager or HR ask what that team is dealing with, and repeat the question next time.
“Somewhere else” rising on question 9
from 9% to 17% in a year.
- What it means
- More people expect to leave.
- What it doesn't mean
- It doesn't predict who will go, and a good job market alone can move it.
- What to do
- Run the stay survey across the whole department to find out what would change minds.
What to tell people afterwards
Within a few weeks, tell people the two strongest results and the two weakest, and what you will and won't do about them.
What to measure next, and when
Report on those actions before the next survey. Use a focused template (manager, workload, belonging) on the weakest area next quarter.
Related
Sources
- Huebner, L. A., Zacher, H. (2021). Following Up on Employee Surveys: A Conceptual Framework and Systematic Review. Frontiers in Psychology, 12. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.801073
- Harter, J. K., Schmidt, F. L., Hayes, T. L. (2002). Business-unit-level relationship between employee satisfaction, employee engagement, and business outcomes: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87, 268-279. doi:10.1037/0021-9010.87.2.268
- Christian, M. S., Garza, A. S., Slaughter, J. E. (2011). Work engagement: A quantitative review and test of its relations with task and contextual performance. Personnel Psychology, 64, 89-136. doi:10.1111/j.1744-6570.2010.01203.x