The Best Employee Engagement Survey Questions to Ask to Build High-Performing Teams
Engagement + Culture January 23, 2023 0

The Best Employee Engagement Survey Questions to Ask to Build High-Performing Teams

We cannot overstate the importance of employee engagement. High engagement can reduce turnover, increase efficiency and productivity, improve client retention, and lead to higher company profitability. Overall, having highly engaged employees makes a business easier to manage and enables leaders to focus on high-value tasks and activities.   

The sad reality is that in today’s job market, only a tiny fraction of employees consider themselves “highly engaged.” A Gallup report found that 54% of workers in the US are actually “not engaged”, meaning they are psychologically unattached to their work and company. These employees ‘put time, but not energy or passion, into their work, typically show up to work and contribute the minimum effort required and are often on the lookout for better employment opportunities.’[i] Organizations cannot afford the cost of disengaged staff, from high turnover rates to poor-performing employees, lost productivity, and dissatisfaction spreading to colleagues. 

Employee Engagement Directly Impacts Performance

If you consider the many components of engagement, it is easy to see how levels of engagement correlate with output and performance. Generally, highly engaged employees: 

  • Get regular recognition for their contributions and achievements
  • Have clarity in their role and responsibilities
  • Have the tools, training, and resources needed to do their job
  • Have opportunities to develop professionally 
  • Have competent and reliable team members and leadership groups to rely on for success and inspiration
  • Are heard and have a voice on their team and in the organization
  • Have a manager and leaders who care about their wellbeing and career success
  • Have a sense of purpose, respect, and belonging on their team and in the organization

With all this said, it is not surprising that many organizations are taking steps to re-engage with their employees by seeking regular input through employee engagement surveys. 

Engagement surveys are a great tool for gauging how motivated and engaged employees are with their work and environment and to measure the overall relationship between employees and organizations. They are also an excellent tool for uncovering trends or blind spots that might not be obvious to HR or leaders and giving employees a voice and active role in their development. 

Whether you are looking to get started with engagement surveys or would like to revamp your existing measures of engagement, it is essential to include the right questions in your surveys so you can get the most impact and insight out of them. Here are our top 25 engagement survey questions to ask. 

Top 25 Employee Engagement Survey Questions to Ask 

We recommend keeping engagement surveys concise. Choose the top 10-15 questions to ask employees that are most relevant to the areas of engagement you would like to assess. Shorter surveys will encourage employees to give thoughtful and thorough responses that can reveal insight. 

 Overall Engagement 

1. Do you feel proud to be a part of this organization?

2. How likely are you to recommend this organization to your peers?

3. Do you feel empowered at work and in your role?

Career Development & Compensation

4. Do you have a clear understanding of your career path at the organization? Do you feel you can reach your full potential here?

5. How would you rate your overall work-life balance?

6. Are you satisfied with the compensation package you are currently receiving, including benefits, compensation, or perks?

 Work Environment & Well-Being

7. Do you feel comfortable and supported when contributing ideas and opinions to your team or department?

8. Do you feel that your team environment is transparent?

9. Do you feel mutual respect in the workplace?

10. Do you believe that you have the resources you need to feel comfortable in the workplace (this could include work materials, mental health resources, or food and beverage facilities)?

11. Do you feel that our organization’s work environment is motivational?

12. Are you satisfied with our organization’s measures to achieve diversity and inclusivity? 

 Feedback & Team Environment

13. Are you comfortable asking for assistance when you don’t have the resources to meet your goals?

14. When you face a problem, do you trust that your managers effectively listen to your needs?

15. How would you describe your relationship with your colleagues?

16. Are you comfortable giving and receiving feedback to your team leader and members?

 Management & Leadership 

17. Do you support the approach taken by leaders to reach corporate objectives?

18. Do you feel aligned with the company goals and broader objectives?

19. Do you feel executives enable a positive work environment or culture in our organization?

 Recognition

20. Do you feel that you receive enough recognition for your work?

21. Are given adequate recognition for your contributions to both individual and team projects?

22. When was the last time you felt strong recognition for either hard work or a successful outcome in the workplace?

 Professional/Career Development

23. Do you believe this organization is a good place to develop your career?

24. What new skills would you like to develop, or what responsibilities would you like to take on?

25. Do you believe there are enough learning opportunities offered to you. If not, how can our organization help in your development?

Tips for Executing Excellent Engagement Surveys

When crafting employee engagement surveys, there are a few key factors to consider in the development process[ii].

1) Use surveys as a learning tool for your organization’s leadership teams. The results should be taken seriously, carry value, and be used to identify issues and resolve barriers to success. 

2) Treat all collected feedback with discretion. Maintaining the confidentiality of employee’s feedback will encourage them to participate actively and with honesty. They should not be held ‘against’ employees in any way. 

3) Employee engagement surveys can lead to new methods of evaluating performance. Use the results of engagement surveys to direct your organization in its decision-making processes or to construct a performance management program that allows for more recognition, more collaborative career planning, or better goal clarity and alignment. 

4) Follow through. If you go down the path of assessing engagement, your leadership team should be united and committed to following through on the results and using the surveys as a means of accountability and change. Employees want to be heard, but more than that, they want to know their voices have weight and will affect change. 

When employees are engaged, they often go that extra mile to meet their personal and professional goals and are more likely to infect others with a higher standard of performance and output. Over time, your organization will be able to hire, engage and develop a strong team of highly engaged and motivated employees who will give you an immense competitive advantage. 

emPerform makes it easy to collect the organizational data you need for decision-making and to identify and develop highly engaged teams. Included in emPerform is a survey tool to create and launch an unlimited number of surveys, including engagement surveys, pulse surveys, satisfaction surveys, and more.

Learn how emPerform’s full-featured performance management solution can help your organization strengthen employee engagement, retain top talent, and provide your organization with a competitive advantage in today’s talent market. 

[i] Harter, J. (2021, June 25). Historic drop in employee engagement follows record rise. Gallup.com. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/313313/historic-drop-employee-engagement-follows-record-rise.aspx.

[ii] Craig, W. (2018, September 18). Benefits of Measuring Employee Engagement. Forbes.com. https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamcraig/2018/09/18/8-benefits-of-measuring-employee-engagement/?sh=1fa3404a7c55

The Do’s and Don’ts of Executing Engagement Surveys: Part 1- DO
Engagement + Culture March 24, 2011 0

The Do’s and Don’ts of Executing Engagement Surveys: Part 1- DO

Do's and Don'ts of employee engagement surveys thumbs up and down

In a  recently blog post, we spoke about the importance of employee engagement and how a lack thereof can snowball into serious financial losses for an organization (or serious opportunity costs – depending on how you want to look at it).

Employee engagement is an employee’s passion for their job which influences their willingness to learn & perform at work. Because it has been shown that there is a direct correlation between employee engagement and business profitability, it is no wonder that engagement has been a hot topic for quite some time and that organizations are seeking to increase engagement as much as possible.

One of the tips that I offered to help boost employee engagement is to ‘ask’. Since informal polling of staff through casual dialogue is not always feasible or effective, conducting employee engagement surveys is a great way to gauge overall engagement and to ‘ask’ staff about engagement issues.

I just finished reading ‘One Page Talent Management’ written by Mark Effron and Miriam Ort. In the book, the authors serve up clear and simple suggestions for crafting and executing employee engagement surveys.

DO:

Ask as few questions as possible:

If this is the first time that you are creating and executing an engagement survey, it might be difficult to hone in on the exact data that you  should aim to capture  but time spent prioritizing items will be worth it. Employees are more likely to complete surveys if they are relatively shorter and survey results are easier to compile and share if they are concise.

Ask Questions that are Actionable:

You might have tons of questions that can gauge engagement; however, unless management can act on the results, they are useless and will not help to increase engagement. A good practice is to run the potential questions by managers and ask them to provide two action items should the answers be ‘low’. If the managers cannot name any items, then the question should be left out, or reworded.

Share the Results with as Many Levels as Possible:

If a properly formatted engagement survey indicates low engagement AND provides the action items necessary to remedy it, then the results should be shared with as many levels of management as possible. Sharing the results is the only way to improve the situation across the entire organization. If the survey process itself is fully automated, then this should not be a problem at all and would make sharing the results as easy as clicking a button. *

Conduct Engagement Surveys Annually:

If an engagement survey is formatted properly, offers a clear degree of engagement and offers actionable items for increasing engagement, then it just makes sense that management has timely versions to refer to. Some companies even find it beneficial to conduct very short engagement surveys semi-annually in order to have timely data and to gauge the effects of engagement initiatives.

Set Engagement Improvement Goals:

After you have conducted your first engagement survey, you should have a handle on the status of employee engagement across each department and the organization as a whole. Use these results to set measurable engagement goals that managers and the organization are expected to reach. Accountability will help to ensure that a company’s leaders at every level are committed to improving engagement.

* Included within emPerform is an eSurvey module that allows organizations to quickly create, distribute, and analyze web-based surveys. Also available with emPerform is a library of best-practice survey questions for all surveys types.