Employee engagement surveys are a great way to receive feedback from employees on company culture, job satisfaction, and more. The idea of conducting a survey seems simple, but it’s important to ask the right questions. Clear, concise questions can provide accurate and reliable results, while surveys with confusing questions can frustrate employees and provide unreliable results.
Surveys are a complicated topic, but with a few tips, you can start in the right direction. When creating your employee feedback survey, here are a few things to keep in mind:
- Know your goal.
Before writing the questions for your survey, think about what you want the results to tell you. This will help you curate questions that are focused on the topic you want to learn the most about. Rather than making a general survey, the questions should be specific. Here are a few topics that you might want results on:
- Areas of improvement for company culture
- Employee job satisfaction
- Quality of and how to improve communication
If you have multiple goals, you can break your survey up into multiple sections. Knowing these overall goals will give you insight into what specifics questions to ask. For example, asking employees “how do you like our company culture?” will most likely result in generic and false-positive responses.
- Be as clear as possible.
Employees won’t answer questions they don’t understand. This isn’t a test. When writing questions, keep in mind if they are easily understood by employees at all levels and in all departments. Be as precise as you can, but don’t lead the reader either. An example of a question that is leading might be asking how happy an employee is. Instead, provide a sliding scale from satisfied to dissatisfied and ask the employee how they feel.
- Keep it simple.
Make the survey simple for employees to take. Employees who are busy or do not work at a desk all day will have to take time out of their day to provide you with answers. Make sure the survey takes less than 10 minutes to complete and can easily be completed online. Send the survey link in an email. For a better response rate, it’s also best to keep these surveys anonymous.
- Ask one thing at a time.
It’s easy to accidentally combine two questions into one. This causes confusion and can make results less reliable. Stick to one concept at a time. For example, instead of stating “I feel satisfied and comfortable in my job,” ask “I feel comfortable in my job.” and “I am satisfied with my current work.” This provides results on two different concepts.
Still not sure what to ask employees in your survey? Click here for questions to get you started!