Surveying employees to gauge their engagement is more complex than it sounds—learn from the experts.
Employee Engagement: Definition
Employee engagement is sometimes defined as how committed an employee is to their workplace achieving its business goals. This can be a tricky factor to measure because, in most cases, these are qualitative measures.
For instance, many say employee engagement is:
- How passionate an employee is
- How much they care about their job
- The pride and purpose they feel by working for their company
It is challenging to come up with a concrete definition of employee engagement and even more difficult to measure.
Is an Engaged Employee a Happy Employee?
Although employee engagement is an often-discussed concept, employee happiness is actually more important. When an employee leaves a job, it’s commonly because they do not feel happy. Rarely does someone say, “I love my job—I am engaged there.” Instead, they’ll say, “I love my job—I am happy there.”
Happy employees are often engaged, so these two concepts are intertwined in many ways. At Amazing Workplace, we focus on happiness first. When asked why we’re the best employee engagement survey provider, our answer is simple: we understand how to measure happiness first.
How to Tell if an Employee is Engaged
When assessing the baseline of your employees’ engagement, happiness, or satisfaction, it makes sense to start by providing an employee engagement survey.
It may be tempting to ask someone in HR to create your survey, polling employees on whether they feel engaged, are happy at work, and what else they’re hoping for. However, the design of this survey is essential for those who want accurate and actionable answers.
Palmer Morris-Samuels, one of the world's leading experts in surveys and assessments, noted in Harvard Business Review, "What makes the difference between a good workplace survey and a bad one? The difference, quite simply, is careful and informed design. And, unfortunately, too many managers and HR professionals have fallen behind advances in survey design.”
Creating employee surveys in-house is a costly experiment that asks employees to do something outside their expertise. Looking for an expert employee engagement survey provider is the smartest choice you can make when undertaking this kind of initiative.
What Survey Questions to Ask an Employee
Many software tools make it easy to create an online survey. This may lead you and your company to think it would be cost-effective and straightforward to design your own survey. It’s important to realize that building the survey is not the actual challenge when providing an employee engagement survey. Instead, the challenges lie in asking questions in a way that will garner the information you truly want.
You may ask an employee, “On a scale of 1-10, how engaged do you feel?” On one hand, the explicit answer may seem like the most helpful piece of data. On the other hand, does a question like that really cover the critical nuances of measuring engagement and happiness? Most employees do not know what "engaged" means here. A well-designed survey asks questions that employees understand and relate to, and it turns their answers into accurate, actionable results on engagement and happiness.
With extensive experience enabling employers to understand their employees, we can tell you that although the simple questions seem appealing, you will need more critical data to make this survey worthwhile.
How to Build an Employee Engagement Survey
Building a survey starts long before the technical portion of physically creating the survey. This initiative involves:
- A comprehensive set of data collection tasks
- Interviews with management
- Understanding of employees’ roles and structures
- An entire field of understanding human behavior
Only by asking the right questions in the right ways can your business understand the current status of your employees’ engagement and happiness. While this looks daunting, our Employee Happiness Platform and Survey Studio were built from the ground up to simplify these tasks and provide research-backed questions and processes that yield actionable results.
Elevate Your Team's Satisfaction: Why Amazing Workplace Surveys Are the Smart Choice
Choosing an employee engagement survey provider is the most important decision you can make when you want to understand and improve your employees’ engagement and happiness at work. Contact us today to schedule a demo and learn how we can help!