Crafting the Perfect Employee Survey: 6 Essential Questions You Need to Ask?

‍The title is slightly deceiving because whilst there are definitely essential employee survey questions that can be asked there are no same 6 questions that need to be asked. It rather depends on what you’re trying to achieve and what methodology is used.

Employee surveys are a powerful tool for understanding employee satisfaction, engagement, and overall organisational climate. However, designing effective employee survey questions is crucial to ensure that the survey provides meaningful and actionable insights. Employee engagement is so broad brush and covers a range of topics and there are many questions that can be asked that cover each topic depending on what you are trying to accomplish.

Outcomes

In terms of outcomes, if you want, for example, to be a more diverse organisation, you’d ask questions about culture, diversity, inclusion and belonging to assess whether you’re successful there. If your strategy was about customer service then the questions would focus on whether the employees promote the organisation, are able to innovate and are empowered to continually act on feedback.

Methodologies

Methodologies like: Say, Stay and Strive which is based around the fact that engaged employees say positive things about the company, stay with the organisation, and strive to go above and beyond – whether they’re advocates. By asking employees questions related to these aspects, organisations can identify engaged members of staff. The Gallup 12 questions are based on the employee needs managers can meet in order to improve employees’ productivity and they determine the strength of your organisation.

There are many blogs on the internet stating that there is an ideal number of questions (just like our title!) but this isn’t a helpful approach. We’re not saying that the above methodologies are ineffective, they are accepted approaches that can provide valuable insights. However, each organisation starting out on their survey journey will have their own set of requirements and sometimes a rigid approach may not achieve the desired results.

Our Approach to Creating Employee Survey Questions

We take a flexible approach at The Survey Initiative. We looked at all the research that’s out there starting with Engage for Success, but also Say, Stay and Strive, Gallup and other research that discusses why employees like going to work and what engages them. We developed our own six pillar model with HRD’s, using the Engage for Success four enablers as the basis – Engaging Managers, Employee Voice, Compelling Leadership and Organisational Integrity. We’ve added ‘Realising Potential’ which is about individuals being supported through development and training and we’ve also added ‘Health & Wellbeing’ which focuses on an individual’s wellbeing and whether they can be themselves and feel included in the diverse workforce.

In terms of designing each employee survey, the six pillars inform the design, we start the conversation – by finding out what it is that are you trying to achieve and what’s important to you. The pillars broadly cover a lot of the employee experience and then we extend the questions from there.

We make sure that the questions are clear, concise, and easy to understand. We avoid using jargon or complex language that may confuse and use simple and straightforward language that can be easily interpreted by all employees. Additionally, we make sure that the questions are not leading or biased, as this can influence the responses and compromise the validity of the survey.

Crafting the perfect employee survey, and creating the best employee survey questions requires careful thought and consideration. There’s no one measure of engagement and the perfect off-the-shelf employee survey doesn’t really exist, regardless of the types of employee survey questions you may ask. To make the most out of your investment you need to discuss your requirements so that the surveys can be tailored to your organisation. That’s where we come in, we get to know your business and work with you to produce the perfect employee survey for your organisation with the essential employee survey questions you need to ask for the desired outcome.

We’d love to help you with employee survey questions that will deliver powerful employee insights. So if you want to learn more about this or any of our other types of staff surveys, employee engagement surveys, 360 feedback surveys or pulse surveys, get in touch!