Employee Engagement Surveys: What you Need to Know

If you’re looking to perform an employee engagement assessment, a survey is an obvious first step. The best way to find out more about your people’s connection to their work is to ask them about it, and, when combined with regular 1:1 meetings, feedback and reviews, an anonymous survey helps you build a really clear picture of employee engagement across your teams.

So how do you get started? In Frankli, you can create and publish an employee engagement survey in as little as 30 seconds. The platform does the hard work, including setting the questions, inviting and reminding employees to respond, and reporting on the results, for you.

If you’re putting your survey together yourself, you’ll probably have lots of questions on employee engagement survey best practices. That’s why we’ve put together a little Q&A, featuring everything you need to know about employee engagement surveys.

Surveys in Frankli: We do the hard part for you

Employee Engagement Survey: What you Need to Know

What is employee engagement?

Employee engagement is best defined as an emotional commitment and connection to the company and its goals. It’s closely related to employee satisfaction, but it’s more about how people interact with their work, how connected people are to their teams, and how much they care about doing a good job.

‍Why is employee engagement important?

High employee engagement leads to positive outcomes in terms of customer loyalty, profitability, productivity, turnover, absenteeism, wellbeing and more (1), so there are huge benefits to measuring and improving engagement across your teams.

What’s a good benchmark for measuring employee engagement?

According to Gallup (2), just 20% of employees are engaged at work, which I think we can all agree is a disheartening statistic. Industries like tech (42%) and professional services (41%) are reporting better than average engagement (3), but it’s important not to get too focused on benchmarks, and instead aim for the highest engagement rate that’s possible for your teams.

What’s the purpose of an employee engagement survey?

An employee engagement survey is one of many great ways to give your people a voice, and invite them to flag concerns and make suggestions. The results help managers and leaders identify room for improvement and make positive changes within the company.

Should an employee engagement survey be anonymous?

An employee engagement survey can be anonymous, or the responses can be confidential, where only a select few people have access to them. With anonymous surveys, the responses tend to be more honest, but you don’t have the ability to respond to any issues raised in individual comments. With confidential surveys, you can take direct action, but the responses will probably be more guarded. In Frankli, employee engagement surveys are anonymous, as we feel anonymous surveys create a more accurate picture of employee engagement, when measured alongside employee feedback, and information shared in reviews and 1:1s. Whichever you choose, it’s important to clearly communicate to recipients how their responses will be used.

‍How long should an employee engagement survey be?

We advise keeping your employee engagement survey to 10 or 15 questions. 12 or 13 is the sweet spot for most teams.

‍How often should we roll out an employee engagement survey?

We recommend rolling out an employee engagement survey at least once a year. If your survey is well-constructed and not too time-consuming, and you're actively working on improving engagement, you might benefit from running it more regularly, for example, once per quarter.

‍What questions should I ask in an employee engagement survey?

We’ve got a really handy template featuring some of the best employee engagement survey questions here. These questions are designed to be answered using the Likert Scale (Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Neutral, Agree, Strongly Agree), making the responses easier to report on, but if you’d like more detailed answers, you could provide text boxes instead. Just remember that people tend to invest less time the longer a survey is, so detailed surveys don’t necessarily yield high-quality responses. If you’re doing your survey through Frankli, the platform does that hard part for you - use the in-app template and you’re ready to go!

Are employee engagement surveys and employee satisfaction surveys the same thing?

Not exactly. While these two surveys may have questions in common, they have slightly different aims. An employee engagement survey is designed to measure your people’s connection to the company, whereas an employee satisfaction survey measures how happy they are in their role.

‍What are the ideal results in an employee engagement survey?

For all of the sample questions we've suggested here, you want the average score to be Agree or Strongly Agree. Depending on the nature of the question, you ideally want to see between 60% and 80% agreement from your people.

How else can I measure employee engagement?

Asking your managers to hold regular 1:1s with their people is a great way to deepen your understanding of employee engagement across your teams. In Frankli, we’ve automated as much of this process as possible, and included templates with useful talking points, including one on job satisfaction that compliments an employee engagement survey really well.

‍Our employee engagement survey is complete. What’s next?

Your next step is to analyse the results of the survey (in Frankli, the platform takes care of this part), identify areas where improvements need to be made and make a plan for actioning these improvements. It can be helpful to set a specific goal with objectives and key results around this. There’s a goal template for this in Frankli too, so you can get the ball rolling on this project in under a minute. It’s a good idea to create a Task reminding you to run the employee engagement survey again in a couple of months, or once some of the work on improving engagement is underway.

It takes less than 30 seconds to create and publish an employee engagement survey through Frankli. Get started today.

1. Gallup, The Relationship Between Engagement at Work and Organizational Outcomes. 2. Gallup, U.S. Employee Engagement Data Hold Steady in First Half of 2021. 3. Heartbeat by Workday, Global Employee Engagement Data 2020.