Why Employee Surveys are Important for Employee Engagement?

Employee engagement is one of the most critical bellwethers of corporate success. Why? Because engaged employees are more productive, committed, and loyal. But what’s the best way to ensure that engagement remains high? One of the most effective solutions is employee surveys, which allow you to make sure morale is good and that workers feel connected to company life. And with Sociabble’s innovative surveys module, it’s never been easier to take the pulse of your workforce with an employee satisfaction survey, a poll, or a questionnaire–the sky is the limit.

The importance of employee engagement surveys… from the employee side.

The last several years have seen fundamental changes in the corporate environment, with flex offices, remote work, and hybrid scenarios becoming commonplace. With these changes also frequently comes a sense of disconnection, or diminished employee satisfaction. Employee retention has become an issue as well, as many workers no longer feel part of a common team. Employees are simply not in the physical office to the same extent that they once were, and it’s more important than ever to ensure that they feel part of company life, and that they’re kept up to date with the news and information they need, boosting employee morale in the process. 

There are ideas out there to increase employee engagement, but a tool is needed to encourage employee content creation, and make sure their needs and concerns are being addressed, and not falling through the cracks. 

And as you may have guessed, this tool is the employee survey. Employee surveys are the feedback mechanism that allows for meaningful upward communication and strategy realignment, and eventually increases employee satisfaction and even employee retention. 

A new kind of employee engagement survey is needed. Pulse surveys for employee satisfaction are not enough.

Pulse surveys used to serve the purpose of measuring engagement and employee satisfaction. But today, given the complex scenarios and remote situations that have become increasingly the norm, something more targeted, specific, and dynamic is needed to get insights into employee sentiment.

Traditionally, engagement surveys or “pulse” surveys have been used as a means of keeping tabs on employee engagement and morale. These surveys were generally conducted once or twice a year; they were not a regular occurrence.The annual employee survey was often just another way of going through the motions, a small insight into the employee experience.

However, in light of the changes described above, it’s no longer enough. A new kind of employee engagement survey is called for to gauge employee sentiment. The future of employee engagement is changing and employees need more frequent contact than ever, the old way simply is no longer sufficient to help create engaged employees, or to enhance the employee experience.

One employee engagement survey conducted by an external survey provider found that while 95% of employees said they were equally or more likely to respond to surveys now, 85% said that the frequency of surveys had not increased at all.* But beyond frequency, there is also the subject of targeting, as it pertains to employee surveys and employee feedback. 

You cannot ask the same sorts of questions to all your different employees. The employee experience is too diverse for that. Your company is likely composed of a variety of roles: those who work from home, those who still work in the office, and frontline workers who are in the field. Each will have different needs and situations, they will be facing different challenges when it comes to employee surveys.

It would be counterproductive to ask all of them the exact same set of questions, not to mention potentially tone-deaf. You have to ensure that all employees are being reached and listened to, even those without a professional email address. And you need to be sure that they know they’re being listened to to increase employee engagement. Employee feedback is critical. The employee experience needs to be considered by the management team, based on learnings from the employees themselves. 

Employee recognition is important too; they want their voices and ideas to be heard, they want to be part of the transformation of their company. And this is another crucial component of an effective survey, especially when it comes to bolstering employee engagement.

How to make your employee surveys effective?

Employee engagement surveys need to be decentralized and flexible in order to be effective. Traditional surveys have historically been too centralized, too top-down. 

In order for modern surveys to be effective, they need to be conducted not only at the top level, by headquarters, but also by local managers in the field. Employee feedback needs to be collected at a more local level.

These local managers need the power to get feedback and ideas from the teams they actually manage. Essentially, the governance of employee surveys needs to be decentralized to be relevant. Sometimes such employee surveys should be anonymous to be effective, and sometimes they are more useful if authenticated. Decentralization and flexibility are key. And managers need the power to adjust surveys to fit their specific employee engagement needs, when it comes to conducting an effective employee survey. 

To address this new need, many companies have relied on external employee survey solutions. But problems still arise.

In order to try to reconnect with workers and understand their needs, many companies have begun using external employee survey solutions like SurveyMonkey, Typeform, and Qualtrics to name a few. And while these services do provide employee engagement surveys that staff can take, there are obvious problems that crop up.

For example:

No integration.

These employee surveys are not integrated into the company’s own information system, and they require a lot of work afterward in order to function, and when it comes to measuring employee engagement.

Hard to get people engaged.

For employee surveys to work well, it needs to be introduced and teased, clearly explained, with results that are properly communicated afterward. And it needs to be well-branded to make people feel comfortable.

Data privacy risks.

In some cases (not all), employee survey providers do not have full data security for results and responses. Essentially, many of the tools out there don’t integrate seamlessly with the employee experience, or the information system of the company. They seem external, even extraneous to company life. 

Being able to easily create surveys that can be sent out on a regular basis by local managers is key. Sociabble’s survey module does just that, with a targeted survey ready in just a few clicks.

So what’s the best solution? Sociabble’s survey module can help. 

According to Forbes, engaged employee teams show 21% more profitability; disengaged employees, meanwhile, cost U.S. companies alone up to $550 billion a year. Obviously, engagement matters, for the health of any company. And the best way to gauge engagement and adjust your internal comms program to enhance it is with a targetable, tailored, and a personalized employee surveys function that enables upward communication.

At Sociabble, we’ve done extensive research and benchmarking to build the best employee engagement surveys and survey experience for end-users—but also for comms teams or managers who set up the surveys. We wanted a solution that made creating, targeting, and sending engagement surveys simple, while allowing for fine-tuning to accommodate differences in team, office, and region. Special features to help create engaged employees include:

Administrators or authorized users can quickly set up a survey.

Can be an instant poll with one question or a more sophisticated survey, with multiple choice questions, open questions, etc. We provide an easy to use and visual survey designer that lets authorized users define every step of the employee surveys and then take stock of survey results.

Administrators and managers can completely and easily define the design of the survey.

However, if they don’t have the time, they can also readily pick one of our predefined templates from a regularly updated library for your employee surveys.

Surveys can be set to be anonymous or authenticated.

In addition, you can also decide if the results of your employee engagement surveys will be shared with end-users.

Users benefit from all the multi-language capabilities of the platform.

This means it’s possible to create multiple versions of the polls or employee surveys to fit your global workforce. Engagement surveys can be be written in several languages, so that employees receive them in the language they speak.

Admins and managers can target a specific audience.

This goes for every employee survey, and also with submission opening and closing dates. Engagement surveys can target employees by office, region, language, role, interests–the possibilities are virtually endless. And thanks to analytics capable of helping you make sense of your employee engagement survey results and other survey data, you can easily make adjustments to resolve issues. 

Survey creators benefit from all the engagement features available on the platform:

Mobile and email alerts to trigger the attention of the targeted audience, gamification and rewards to increase the level of participation, content pinning on top of channels, and much more. For those who find employee surveys important, they will find the means to ensure that the target receives them. 

And needless to say, by using Sociabble’s employee engagement surveys, companies take advantage of a fully secured and GDPR-compliant environment.

With Sociabble’s survey module, you can select your precise audience, and make sure they receive the relevant survey, even on a mobile device, which is especially important for frontline workers.

Conclusion: Sociabble’s survey feature is the key to boosting and maintaining employee engagement.

The role of employee engagement surveys in increasing engagement cannot be overstated, and with the changes that have taken place over the last few years in work environments, it cannot be ignored. If you’d like to optimize engagement at your company, then now is the perfect time to act. At Sociabble, we’ve helped hundreds of companies around the world improve their Employee Communication, including industry leaders like Coca-Cola CCEP, L’Occitane en Provence, AXA, and Primark.

To learn more, just sign up for a free, personalized demo. We’d love to chat!

*Source : https://www.surveymonkey.com/curiosity/should-you-send-surveys-during-the-coronavirus-crisis/