One factor that differentiates a successful business is its employee engagement. Engaged employees generate a feeling of connection with their organization that motivates them to pursue shared objectives, becoming employees more productive and reliable.
This engagement is what makes the staff get involved in improvement processes and always look for ways to make the company prosper.
But to engage employees, the first thing is to set an example. So only companies engaged with their workforce can expect to receive the same in return .
How to demonstrate that commitment? Asking questions. And this is where pulse surveys take the main role.
Thanks to these short but recurring questionnaires, it’s possible to find out what the employees expect from their company and see if you are meeting their expectations or if there is something you need to improve.
The great advantage of pulse surveys is that you can identify when your engagement and loyalty strategy begins to fail long before it becomes a bigger problem with worse consequences.
In addition, it also allows you to discover your areas for improvement, as well as your strengths, which will help you design effective action plans that “attack” the problems directly where they are.
Pulse surveys turn employee data into quantifiable information, and by combining it with open-ended responses, you’ll be able to draw meaningful, real-world insights about the status of their engagement, track it and see the progress in real-time. This means that you will be a leader capable of making the best decisions at the right time.
How to write engagement pulse survey questions that work?
In pulse surveys, what questions you ask and how you ask them have a direct impact on achieving your goal.
If you want to measure engagement, but you fail when writing the questions, the results will not be the same and your efforts will not be rewarded.
In order not to take that risk, we share with you 6 tips that will make a difference.
Use clear and understandable language
When employees read the questions they must understand what is being asked of them, so that they can respond without hesitation.
Avoid using metaphors, euphemisms, technical terms and any type of jargon that could lead to misunderstandings.
Not only because any hint of ambiguity could confuse employees, skewing responses and causing them to lose quality. Also because if employees don’t understand the purpose of the pulse survey, they will get frustrated and stop participating in future ones.
The most effective engagement surveys are those that use short, direct, and simple statements.
Beware of the tone
The tone with which you address your staff is also a factor that you must take care of.
It is advisable to use a close, friendly and empathetic tone, consistent with the one you use in your internal communications.
That said, keep in mind that we cannot be too formal, as the survey could sound too serious and intimidating; not too informal, because the message could lose meaning and authority.
Take care of your corporative culture
When searching for the right questions to ask for an engagement survey, many companies find online templates and use them without changing anything. There’s nothing wrong with using references, but you do need to tailor your questions to your company’s culture.
The questions must be related to your way of managing people, and to the values and philosophy shared by all the people within the organization.
When the employees answer the questions they have to have the impression that it is their company that is speaking to them.
That’s why in Team Insights you can customize all our predefined surveys, as well as the welcome emails, to suit you and your company’s needs.
Ask actionable questions
All the questions you ask must be aimed at observing results in the short and medium term.
Therefore, poll your employees about the current situation of your company or changes you plan to make.
The simple fact that your team sees that engagement pulse surveys have a real effect on what happens in the organization is an engagement driver itself.
But, if you ask about topics that have little or nothing to do with your company, the employees will lose even more confidence, achieving the opposite effect to your objective of improving employee engagement.
Do not use too many open questions
Excessive use of open questions makes pulse surveys lose all their meaning, since they are not quick and require time to answer them properly. Also, their responses are much more complicated to monitor, so engagement measurement becomes ineffective.
However, open questions are the best resource to obtain qualitative data that contextualize the scores obtained. For this reason, it’s preferable to use closed questions with quick answers (for example, numerical answers from 1 to 5) and limit the open ones only to ask about the mood and delve into the most critical or greatest interest that drives employee engagement.
Leave space for free feedback
By this, we don’t mean an open question, but a space where employees can comment freely and, importantly, anonymously , on any aspect that concerns them about the organization and that was not covered in the engagement survey.
These comments are usually left at the end of each pulse survey, asking contributors if there is anything they would like to add. But in addition to this option, in Team Insights we have a specific resource in which people, through their employee area, they can leave comments directly to the administrator or their direct manager, without having to wait to answer a pulse survey.
Thus, every time an employee has a concern, they can share it with the organization avoiding intermediaries or scheduling meetings, which helps speed up the process of improving engagement.
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