How can HR make the Employee Engagement survey more impactful & Accurate

Employees are 4.6 times more likely to feel empowered and deliver their best work when their voice is heard. 

Employee Engagement is about the level of employee satisfaction at the workplace based on factors like infrastructure, good relations with managers and colleagues, appreciation at the workplace, attractive salary, work-life balance and several other big and small factors. And the corporate world has shown a tremendous shift in the recent past from just being consumer-centric to focusing on employees and their happiness. It is a continuous process just like a customer happiness journey that needs constant up-gradation and innovation. 

The year 2021 is surely a little different from the past few years for the corporate world as many organizations have shifted from work from home to a hybrid workplace where some of their employees are still working from home and the other half have started to visit the office space and perform their tasks. This brings in new challenges and a ray of new opportunities for both individuals and businesses especially HR leaders where they have to innovate or modify their engagement and feedback approach. 

Often, HR leaders start their year by running an Employee Engagement survey to understand their employee’s experience and track these metrics to create a better workplace. This year is nothing different but it surely needs a shift in approach and new metrics need to be calculated for a successful survey. 

These metrics help leaders understand how their employees feel and the things they seek from their organization to stay motivated and engaged.

Redefining Employee Engagement Survey

Given the hybrid work environment, knowing how your employees are feeling in the new normal is important and surely the questions we need to ask our employees need to undergo a makeover. 

Why and how can HR leaders work to redefine their engagement survey? Let’s take a look…

1. There is a need to create a more consistent feedback process

Running a yearly survey alone to understand how employees feel and why they feel that way by creating a comprehensive questionnaire will lack the accuracy of the data. In the hybrid work environment, we would suggest along with the annual survey you also offer a platform where employees can share their daily feedback, anytime and anywhere. 

2. Organisation today must ask the little things

The core of any employee engagement survey is to ask employees what they feel but are not very vocal every time about it. The formula to a successful engagement survey at the workplace is to remember every little detail shared by the employee as well as the nuances observed and analyzed by the leaders. The questions you asked last year might not be relevant this year and maybe you might have to dig deeper and ask more. 

3. Be a game-changer

Adopting a hybrid approach where the appreciation and recognition are given both ways a traditional one by thanking in person and giving a thank you note with some reward and taking on a social approach by recognizing employees and teams for their valuable efforts on a social recognition platform is a game-changer. So, the point here is to understand that they are recognized often and how it helps them in their daily work life. 

Let’s look at areas that need to be surveyed differently in your Employee Engagement survey in the current year. 

1. Work-life balance

For any individual to focus and grow in life there must be a balance in life. Remote working has surely impacted the work-life balance of every employee. While some feel that they were able to spend more time with family due to no travel and that helped them to focus more at work, whereas, a few others will tell you that they struggled a lot and were unable to disconnect from work life and focus on their personal life. 

With many organizations that have started to work from the office, it is important to know how are employees adopting this and are they able to manage a work-life balance. 

Sample questions to ask employees:

1. On a scale of 1 to 10, how much would you rate your work-life balance?
2. Do you think the organization has given you enough opportunities to enjoy a healthy work-life balance?

2. Relationship with peers

Human relation is very powerful. Peer-to-peer relation has a major impact on Employee Engagement as it defines the bond and collaboration between team members as well as colleagues from different departments. This sync reflects a healthy professional relationship with each other and also helps to complete any project smoothly.

To gauge peer-to-peer relationships, you can ask employees how often they feel appreciated and praised by their colleagues. 

Sample questions to include in your survey:

1. Do you feel your organization encourages peer-to-peer recognition? 
2. On a scale of 1 to 10, how comfortable are you to recognize your teammates?
3. Has any employee helped you during remote or hybrid working? How did you feel?
4. Did you recognize or praise your colleagues’ effort during remote working?

3. Relationship with managers 

It is rightly said that people join companies but they leave managers. The manager is the first point of contact for the employee during his professional journey at any workplace. The manager-employee relationship is so crucial in deciding the employees’ journey within the organization. How motivated and valued an employee feels, how transparent and open are their conversation, the trust and professional comfort clubs together to bring out the best in an employee. 

In this hybrid work environment where managers are team members are not able to sit and brainstorm together often but were they or are they still in constant touch with each other on virtual platforms and are they communicating with others will have a huge impact on employee engagement. 

Questions to ask employees in the survey: 

1. Were there any communication gaps during remote working?
2. Were you recognized and motivated by your manager? 
3. Is there anything you would like to change to improve your professional relationship with your manager? 

4. Workplace culture

Describing a workplace culture to your employees now and then and having employees who naturally adopt the work culture and feel happy at the workplace are two different things and having a natural adoption is true engagement of employees with the organization. 

During work from home having employees follow a certain kind of work culture could have been a task. Ensuring that your employees still connect to the culture is important.

Include these questions in your survey:

1. Is your work environment distracting?
2. Do you still feel connected and follow the work culture even during remote working?

5. Happiness at workplace

In employee engagement, happiness is an important metric to track. But alone a yes or a no answer will not be complete. Finding the ‘why’ reason is important in calculating the happiness index. The research reveals that happy workers are 12% more productive, so it’s worth knowing this and investing in happiness. 

Personal life happiness has a huge impact on happiness at the workplace so knowing the reason behind their mood is so important. 

Questions to ask employees:

1. On a scale from 0-10, how happy are you at work this week?
2. On a scale from 0-10, how excited are you to come to work?

6.Personal growth / professional development

Personal growth is one of the most important metrics to track when it comes to employee engagement at work. Every employee wants to grow – be it monetary, more responsibility, grasp more knowledge, more credit, etc. 

This is the root of your performance tracker for your employee. 

Sample questions to ask:

1. On a scale of 1 to 10 how much you feel you have grown in the last year?
2. What growth opportunities would you like your organization to include?

Now is the perfect time to run the Annual Employee Engagement survey 2021 and understand if the employees are still connected with the company as they were before the 2020 pandemic took place. Knowing how the previous years’ experience moulds their current year’s professional objectives, what they expect from the organization this year are all critical aspects that need to be collated and studied to work towards improving employee engagement in the post-COLD workplace.