Taking the time to conduct an employee engagement survey can help you understand your workforce better and identify areas for improvement. However, there are several factors that you should consider before launching your survey. Among these are the types of questions you should ask, the results you should share and the internal or external benchmarks you should compare your survey to.
Internal vs. external benchmarks
Choosing between internal and external benchmarks for employee engagement survey is not always easy. Both are useful approaches but they can have different limitations and advantages.
Internal benchmarks are best used to measure your organization’s performance against the standards set by your internal best practices. External benchmarks are valuable when you need to compare your company to others. They provide another data point for your managers to track. However, these reports have a few shortcomings.
Compared to internal benchmarks, external benchmarks have a tendency to overwhelm managers and cause them to focus on the wrong things. For example, beating the benchmark isn’t a healthy goal. Instead, leaders should focus on improving the team’s strengths, opportunities and areas of improvement.
Unlike internal benchmarks, external benchmarks are based on data from outside organizations. For this reason, they can set low standards for employee engagement. They are also subject to monetary incentives.
While external benchmarks are helpful in highlighting your organization’s strengths, they can also have negative side effects on employee engagement. For instance, employees can become more receptive to certain types of questions. They also can encourage managers to manipulate their staff to give them better scores.
One thing to remember is that internal and external benchmarks are meant to complement each other. A good employee engagement survey tool should allow you to integrate both types of data into a single dashboard.
Pulse surveys
Using pulse surveys for employee engagement is an easy way to boost employee engagement. This tool helps management and employees understand their workplace concerns and improve work environments.
One of the major advantages of pulse surveys is the ability to collect rich data about your workforce. The results provide immediate feedback about issues that need to be addressed. They also help you see trends in real time. This means that you can predict problems before they happen.
Another advantage of pulse surveys is that they are quick and easy to complete. You can launch them by email or text messaging. They’re also easy to share with teams.
You can also use a pulse survey to find out your employees’ preferences for professional development and mentorship programs. This will allow you to build better teams. And it will also help you retain the best workers.
When conducting pulse surveys for employee engagement, it’s important to keep in mind that you want to avoid survey fatigue. You want to ask specific questions and get quick responses. You can also customize the questions to your organization’s strengths and weaknesses. It’s vital that you analyze the results before you decide what to do next.
You can use the results from a pulse survey to make sure that your company’s culture is on track. You can also use the data to measure customer satisfaction. You can even conduct focus groups to identify issues in your workplace.
Share results
Identifying and presenting key results from an employee engagement survey is a good first step in getting your team engaged. However, follow-through is also important. If you fail to act on the survey’s findings, you risk alienating your employees. This is especially true if they believe nothing is being done about their feedback.
Luckily, you can quickly get your team on board with the right information. You can start by thanking your employees for taking the time to participate in your survey. You should also share your plan for using the results. This can include a link to your results view in your email communications.
You can also create a presentation and use graphs and quotes from your respondents. You might even want to consider giving your presentations to a smaller group of people, such as a department.
The best way to show your employees how much you care is to actually act on their feedback. It is too important to just post a link to your engagement survey results, and not do anything with it.
You can do this by creating a public goal based on your survey results. This will help show your company’s leadership that you are serious about using your employee data.