We’ve worked in conjunction with Dan Wardle of Surveylab to create a free employee engagement survey for anyone to use.
As their name suggests, Surveylab are survey specialists. They help you gain insight into the thoughts of employees, customers, or any other stakeholders via a variety of survey options.
Surveylab liaise with their clients, build a survey to suit information wanted, and run it. They’ll then discuss the results, and establish how best to follow up.
Go EO‘s general aim is to offer small businesses more affordable versions of things big businesses pay big fees for. Employee engagement surveys are one example.
Surveylab agreed there was a place for a simple, completely free employee engagement survey, for any small business to use. Not tailored to your specific business, but asking a lot of the questions common to this kind of survey, and still giving lots of useful data to work with.
The employee engagement survey itself
If you’re intrigued, want to see what the survey’s like, have a play around etc, click here for the demo account. This links to the survey for a demo company. You can view it anonymously, and answer any/all questions without skewing anyone’s results.
When you’re ready to run it properly, for your company, click here for the sign up form. You’ll need to provide a few basic details and submit to automatically set up the survey. You’ll then be emailed a live link for you to share with your employees, as well as further information about what to expect.
Common employee survey questions:
“Why run a staff engagement survey?”
Talking with staff (via formal appraisals and informal chats) is great for getting feedback from individuals. Discussing their concerns and desires. Running occasional surveys won’t replace this.
But a staff engagement survey can be a great way to quickly get a big picture view on how the majority feel about certain things. How do the team feel the business is doing from a few different perspectives.
“What questions does the survey ask?”
Our free employee engagement survey includes 30 “closed” questions, under different subcategories. Example subcategories include:
– colleagues
– our customers
– managers/leaders
In each subcategory, there are several given statements. The survey then asks the employee whether they:
– strongly disagree
– somewhat disagree
– neither agree nor disagree
– somewhat agree
– strongly agree
with a given statement.
The survey then finishes with a handful of “open” questions. IE where the respondent can write whatever they like, as opposed to choosing from a few fixed options.
“Are all survey questions compulsory?”
No. We’ve deliberately not made any of the questions compulsory.
The logic being nobody has to complete the survey. Some people might answer a few questions, get to one they either feel uncomfortable answering, or don’t know how to answer, so give up.
To get the best data, you want as many employees as possible answering as many questions as possible. If only a small number of employees are comfortable enough to complete the survey, the data will be less useful.
“Do we have to include all staff?”
No, you don’t have to. You may have some reasons to limit it to just a subsection of your employees.
That’s fine, you’d then simply only share the link we’ll provide with those you want to complete it.
Make sure when letting us know how many employees there are, you just consider ones you want to do the survey!
However, for smaller businesses, in the absence of any particularly clever/specific reason, we’d suggest offering the survey to all employees.
“How do you run the survey?”
You’ll get an email with link to a specific survey set up for (and unique to) your company. Anyone with that link can complete the survey, so be careful not to share it with anyone outside the organisation.
Share it with any/all employees you’d like to complete it (most likely all employees).
They won’t need to login to anything, or provide any personal data. It relies on cookes to establish whether someone has/hasn’t completed it.
Yes this does mean theoretically someone IT savvy could abuse it, completing it multiple times. In practice, few people will do so. Even if they did, the worst they can do is complete it multiple times. Plus from the data Surveylab can often spot repeat completions by one person, and in the rare occasions it may be required, adjust accordingly.
“When/how will I get the survey results?”
It’s important that a decent number of employees complete it, to get useful data. But we realise there may be practical reasons why some people can’t complete it in a reasonable timeframe.
Surveylab will keep an eye on completions, relative to total employee numbers, and email status updates every 2-3 days.
Once employees have had plenty of time to complete it, and the majority have, the employee engagement survey will be formally closed. A report of the results then shared with you via email.
What to do after the employee engagement survey
Running a survey as a one off can be useful. It may highlight areas staff think the business is weak that you might not have been aware of.
Perhaps they:
– love their colleagues but don’t feel there’s much opportunity for progression? Or
– love dealing with customers but find part of the role boring? Or
– are happy generally but don’t understand where the business is heading?
Finding out the above won’t in itself solve any problems. But knowing and accepting there is a problem is the first step to solving it!
Comparing staff survey results to benchmark scores
No business is perfect in every area. So don’t beat yourself up if your survey shows your business isn’t perfect either!
It can therefore be useful to compare your results to benchmark data. What are the average scores from all businesses that have done a similar survey.
This can help provide comfort that the odd low score isn’t something to panic about. Chances are you’ll score better than average in some areas too.
Comparing staff survey results to other specific businesses
Neither ourselves nor Surveylab will ever share any individual company’s results with anyone else.
But perhaps you may be on good terms with another business you know has done the same survey. They may be happy to share their data with you, especially if you share yours with theirs.
The comparison itself may be useful, but also discussing how you each do things in your respective businesses. You’ll likely do this with other business owners you know well anyway. But having some statistical data to directly compare can help highlight differences in your business you may not be aware of.
Comparing results to previous staff surveys
It can be beneficial to run similar surveys on a regular basis. Perhaps quarterly if they’re quite short (like ours is). Maybe less frequently for more in depth, time consuming surveys.
Doing this can help you establish which way results are trending. Are things improving generally? Are there any areas where the employees feel the business is getting weaker?
Being aware of any downward trends early can help lead to quick rectification, reducing any damage.
Where there were areas you scored poorly on last time, and you took steps to improve, do the results show your efforts succeeded? If yes, great! If no, it may be back to the drawing board.
Where any results have changed significantly, can you pinpoint the cause? Sometimes a key circumstance may positively or negatively impact results.
“What do I do after considering the results?”
That’s entirely up to you. But we’d suggest you do something, and let the staff know what you’re doing.
Asking them to complete the survey should help them feel like you care. That you’re interested in their views. This can be quickly undone if there’s zero acknowledgement or action afterwards.
The results will be sent to whoever asked us to run the employee engagement survey. They should review it first. Often most of it will be in line with expectations. There may be some surprises (good or bad), which it’s worth giving thought to.
After that, we’d recommend sharing the full results with the wider team. This shows transparency and honesty. It’s then worth talking through any areas where scores were below par, and in turn what you intend to do to improve things.
Other employee engagement survey considerations
Maintaining anonymity in the survey
We’d recommend you don’t make any attempt to circumvent anonymity. If people don’t trust in it, they won’t be honest. And if they’re not honest, you’re not getting useful data.
We’ll do our part to help ensure anonymity:
– The survey itself is anonymous.
– No personal data is requested, just the survey answers.
– We limit what results you have access to until the survey is finished.
– Results to each question are given independently (so if potentially you can guess who answered one question a certain way, this doesn’t enable you to see how they answered any other questions).
A couple of the survey questions are open questions. IE people can write whatever they want in response, rather than choose from a small number of options. Staff should be aware they risk impacting the anonymity of their comments if they’re specific “It bugs me sitting next to Dave”, or write in a distinctive way.
But even if they do, that one answer will be separated from their other responses. So there’d be no easy way for you to tell if the person who wrote a certain open question response also gave certain scores on other closed questions.
“But it’ll upset me if I find out staff aren’t happy”
We get this. You like to think you’re doing a great job, and everyone who works there is delighted. When you ask people in person if they’re happy, they say yes…that’s good enough, right?
For many responding that way is the polite thing to do. They don’t want to rock the boat, or risk causing an awkward scene. A little like how British people know the socially acceptable response to “How are you?” is “Good thanks, and you?”!
An anonymous survey helps people feel they can be more honest, as they won’t be individually grilled on their responses afterwards. The impact of lots of employees completing it at the same time also helps give comfort.
But…this likely will mean many staff won’t score the business top marks across the board. Be prepared for that, and don’t beat yourself up about it either! Revisit our earlier comments re comparing results, it may help.
“Someone said something specific (and potentially unpleasant), what do I do?”
Employee engagement surveys are useful for discovering broad trends. People may highlight specific issues, but as discussed above, the survey should be considered anonymous.
Our view would therefore be that when discussing the results with the team, you reinforce this message. Ask anyone who has any specific concerns they want to discuss, to approach you personally.
Deal with those issues on a one to one basis, separately to the broader feelings of the majority of employees.
“I’d like the survey questions tailored specifically to my business”
Our free employee engagement survey is what it is. I’m afraid it can’t be tailored for individual businesses, at least not for free.
We’ve designed the survey to be straight forward, and generic. It’s a way Surveylab can easily share some of their expertise with a lot of businesses at minimal cost to them, enabling it to be free.
For some, this is all they need. They can make some tweaks to how they operate following running it, staff will hopefully be happier, and all is well.
“I need support beyond this free survey”
Possibly this taster survey made you realise there are big issues at play, which need to be dealt with sensitively and in more depth.
Surveylab can help:
– discuss the results with you, and what actions you may wish to take.
– design a more bespoke follow up survey, to dig deeper into any problem areas.
These would be chargeable jobs for Surveylab. But often it’s a small price to pay to improve empoyee engagement across the board.
Visit the Surveylab website here for more information on how they can tailor things to your requirements.
Summary
Knowing how your staff feel is a big step towards improving the business
- Knowledge is power, if you don’t know there’s a problem, you can’t fix it.
- Follow up on the survey, sharing results, and taking appropriate action.
- Benchmark scores can help provide context for your own scores.
- Run periodically, looking for upward and downward trends.
When you’re ready to run this for your team, click here to get started.
If you are interested in finding out more about what Dan/his team at Surveylab can do for you, approach him on LinkedIn here for a confidential conversation.