7 Secrets To Improve Your Employee Engagement Survey

Nearly every company conducts an employee engagement survey. Yet notwithstanding their ubiquity, employee survey research from Leadership IQ finds that only 22% of companies are achieving good results from their employee engagement surveys (i.e., survey scores were low but they've improved dramatically, or they were high and they've stayed high). In other words, the typical employee engagement survey neither increases or maintains employee engagement levels. But the good news is that there are seven secrets mistakes that will immediately improve the efficacy of your employee engagement surveys.

Secret #1: Don't Ask Questions You Can't Fix

On your next employee engagement survey, don't ask a question you don't know how to fix - or can't fix. Every employee survey question implies that you're going to take action based on feedback. If you break that promise, your employees may grow frustrated.

Common employee engagement survey questions that violate this rule include:

• I have great friends at work
• I like my boss
• My boss cares about me as a person
• I trust my boss

These don't seem like horrible questions until you ask yourself, "How would I fix a low score?" In other words, what actionable insights did I get from that question?

Do you know specifically why employees don't trust their boss and how to fix that? Perhaps you could teach leaders to be more transparent or listen better when employees share their problems or solicit more suggestions.

All those options could be actionable insights, but you don't know which your employees want to see improved. And because you don't know the exact issue driving employee engagement down, you're probably going to guess wrong.

Try asking a survey question like, "When I share my work problems with my direct leader, they respond constructively." That's something that can be fixed by teaching managers how to not get defensive, accept the issue, and respond empathically.

Test your employee engagement survey by asking, "Do I know what actions will fix this issue?" If you don't have a definitive answer, cut the survey question.

Secret #2: Don't Ask Employees If They're Satisfied, Find Out If They're Engaged

Employee engagement means that someone will give 100% effort and will recommend the company as a great employer. Engaged employees demonstrate a deep sense of pride, fulfillment, and even excitement.

Employee satisfaction, however, is a far weaker concept than engagement. The word satisfied typically means content, which isn't bad, of course, but is that what you really want from your employees?

If you want employee feedback about the extent to which your workers will shout from the rooftops what a great employer you are, and whether they're inspired to give 100% effort (and thus great employee performance), you must generate survey responses that give you those answers. The typical employee satisfaction survey just won't reveal whether your workforce is truly engaged.

For example: "Working here inspires me to give my best effort." That's a survey question that goes far beyond employee satisfaction and gets to the deeper issue of employee engagement.

Secret #3: Avoid Focusing On Your Lowest Scores

Imagine an organization asks workers to assess leaders, company culture, and the employee experience. In the same survey, executives also ask employees about the corporate color scheme, cafeteria services, and the quality of the office carpet. The survey results eventually show that employees loathe the color scheme, the food, and the carpet, accounting for the lowest scores on the survey.

Are those sentiments really driving low employee engagement or helping you identify your most engaged employees? If you had to choose between training leaders to better recognize high performers or replace the office carpet, which would better help you retain your star employees?

The biggest problem with focusing on the lowest scores from your employee engagement survey results is that those issues often don't impact an employee's willingness to give 100%. Your lowest scores may not be related to performance management or workplace culture, but those may be the issues most in need of an action plan.

To discover which issues drive employee engagement, you need a statistical tool like multiple regression analysis which helps predict the value of one dependent variable based on multiple independent variables. In other words, it's a tool to reveal which issues are the biggest drivers of employee engagement for your unique workforce. Here's a real-life multiple regression analysis for an employee survey.

This analysis shows that over half (53%) of an employee's willingness to recommend their company is driven by whether their direct leader encourages and recognizes suggestions for improvement. On an employee engagement survey that had dozens of questions, the regression analysis discovered that one issue predicted more than half of employees' engagement. If the company fixes this one issue, it can drastically increase employee engagement levels.

Secret #4: Use A Seven-Point Scale Instead of a Five-Point Scale

If employee engagement hasn't changed much, even after multiple employee surveys, you may be using the wrong scale. The five-point scale is the most common; imagine a Likert scale ranging from Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree. It's great for social science research, but the typical employee survey is different because your data can be highly skewed.

The five-point scale was designed for scenarios where the feedback is likely to be normally distributed - roughly as many people will score 1's as they do 5's. That's likely what would happen if you asked 50,000 random people to give feedback on a random statement. But with employee engagement surveys, with respondents who are getting paid by a company, a five-point survey is likely to give you more 5's than 1's.

If you ask employees if your company is a good place to work, you won't get many 1's because if an employee truly thought it was a terrible place to work, they likely would have already quit. But because their employee sentiment is positive enough that they're still showing up to work, they're essentially giving the feedback that while they might be angry and frustrated, they're not so angry that they'll quit, yet.

Use a seven-point scale that ranges from Never to Always instead. You'll still have some skewing of the data, but by using a broader scale you will see more subtle variations in your engagement level.

Secret #5: Candidly Share The Detailed Employee Survey Results

Share the survey results with employees who took the survey soon after the data is tabulated. Sadly, this communication doesn't happen nearly as frequently as it should. Recent data from Leadership IQ shows that only 29% of companies say that all managers share the employee survey results with their workforce.

It falls on managers - the leaders closest to the frontline employees - to ensure that the strengths, opportunities, and feedback discovered in the employee survey are communicated candidly and transparently.

It's also critical to note that you can't simply share the organization wide results. A company can have high overall employee engagement but still struggle with disengaged employees in some areas. And if the company isn't willing to candidly share the less glowing results, it's as though it hasn't really shared the results.

Secret #6: Don't Treat Your Employee Engagement Survey Like A Research Project

Too many companies have the mistaken belief that the purpose of an employee engagement survey is to just gather feedback. It's not; the ultimate goal is to improve employee engagement. Surveys are too time-consuming to just be an exercise conducted out of curiosity.

Only 42% of human resource executives said that their company was 100% willing to take action on every employee engagement survey question. That tells us that more than half, or 58% of companies, are acting on the data they collect.

If a company's leadership asks people to spend time and energy answering questions about their employee morale, and then dismisses or ignores that employee feedback, you can expect employee perception of leaders decline considerably. Ignoring feedback is a quick recipe for creating a disengaged employee.

Secret #7: Employee Engagement Isn't Just A Human Resource Problem

Your employee engagement strategy won't work if you don't give your managers the tools needed to correct the issues identified. Leadership IQ's research has found it takes at a few days of training (or a few weeks of distributed training) to equip managers with skills to do the job effectively.

If your survey discovers that employees find performance management is weak, or that career development is nonexistent, you need to teach managers how to deliver feedback and coach employees in career development. If your survey discovers that employees don't fully understand the goals set by their manager, you need to teach managers how to clearly set and communicate expectations. If employees don't feel like their work is valued, then managers need specific training in employee recognition.

Human resources will be involved in those activities, of course, but ultimately it will fall to managers to implement those actions.