5 Key Reasons to Conduct Employee Engagement Surveys

Conducting engagement surveys is a useful way of gather insight into what is important to your employees. However, what can engagement surveys measure and what will the feedback allow you to do? Read on to discover five key reasons why you should administer employee engagement surveys in your organization.

1. Measure employee engagement:

   The primary reason for issuing engagement surveys is to measure the engagement level of your employees. Measuring the key drivers of engagement within your organization will allow you to assess whether your employees are engaged or disengaged. While there are no standard drivers of engagement, some commonly assessed factors are:  advancement, recognition, pay & benefits, job role, training & development opportunities, leadership, work environment, etc.

2. Give employees a voice:

   Engagement surveys are crucial because they give employees a venue for open feedback. It is an opportunity to establish two-way communication and involve employees in the development process by giving them a direct voice to the management team. Being actively involved in the planning process makes employees realize that they have a stake in the company and that their opinions are valued.

3. Increase employee engagement:

   Once you’ve assessed how engaged your employees are you can then create an action plan to increase engagement. The information obtained from the assessment will allow you to identify strengths and opportunities for improving engagement in your organization. You can develop a company-wide engagement plan or focus directly on action areas for each section in your business. After you’ve identified the changes to apply, you can set priorities, determine resources and create an implementation schedule.

4. Direct organizational growth:

   Knowing how the company measures on areas such as employee satisfaction, management/leadership effectiveness and working environment will give you tangible objectives for change. Assessing engagement will also allow you to identify areas of best practice within your organization. A specific department might rate very high on engagement and by analyzing the data you can gain insight into how they are achieving it and implement best practices throughout the organization. Simply put, engagement survey feedback will give you valuable actionable data that you can implement for organizational growth.

5. Benchmark results:

   Conducting employee engagement surveys will allow you to benchmark the data for comparison purposes. You can look at particular results and compare them with industry-specific data to gain an understanding of how your company performs with similar organizations. Benchmarking will also allow you to identify whether any issues are specific to your company or are industry-wide. If the data shows that only 20% of your employees are satisfied with development opportunities you can compare this to the results of other employers to see if this is a typical finding or one that requires improvement.