What are the best types of employee engagement survey questions?

No two organisations are the same, so why should employee engagement survey questions be? At The Survey Initiative, we create bespoke and targeted survey questions specifically for your organisation in order to retrieve the most accurate results possible. 

The process 

The best types of employee engagement survey questions are ones that are tailored and suited to the company’s needs. If we used a health care specific survey and asked these questions to a banking company, the results would be untrustworthy and inaccurate, often creating more questions and giving no answers.

The Survey Initiative believes that in order to create employee engagement survey questions that work, these need to be designed specifically with the company in mind and what they are trying to achieve. To do this, we first take into account what the client is wanting to achieve by using a survey. Are they trying to solve a problem? Are they trying to improve engagement? Are they just trying to understand their company more? Desired outcomes differ from one company to another, which is why we believe the best approach is a targeted one.

What works for one organisation or industry, will not have the same outcome for another. Every company is different and deserves to be treated accordingly. While some companies produce really good data from questionnaires, others might show better results by talking to people face-to-face, through interviews or group sessions. To decide how to conduct an employee survey, The Survey Initiative first works closely with the people within the company, mostly through focus groups, to gain an insight into the company’s values and ethics. This helps us understand the context within which they are wanting to run their survey and helps us design questions around these matters. What are they trying to understand and achieve, how will they use the survey data and findings, what are the issues they are facing? These are all things we closely monitor in order to build a survey to meet client needs.

So, what are the best types of employee engagement survey questions? 

Once we are confident we know exactly what the client is trying to achieve, we begin to create a targeted questionnaire for the organisation by carefully tailoring questions. For example, a health care survey or childcare survey will be more vocational. When working within healthcare or education for example – a large proportion of the roles will be vocational.  In this situation, a survey would look at helping organisations understand what barriers there are to the naturally high levels of engagement you find within these sectors. Such as removing red tape and bureaucracy, streamlining processes allowing people to do what they love to do in their roles, give care and educate in these sectors. 

Whereas, within industry sectors such as retail or hospitality, organisations often have to work harder to create an environment where people engage in more than just their role or job, here the focus is is more on creating purpose, helping employees understand how what they does makes a difference or contributes to the success of the organisation thus helping them to feel valued.  Within sectors such as manufacturing, the focus for engagement will be more on health and safety and ensuring that employees can call out unsafe practices, stop work if they feel unsafe and understanding if the organisation puts the safety and wellbeing of its people above bottom line profit, for example.

Questions for everyone 

Despite this, there are some questions that work for everybody. Although more generalised, and perhaps not designed to get to the root cause of the problem, these questions are a good indicator of where to start looking. Depending on the answers to these questions, we can then gain a broad insight into where problems may lie and begin digging deeper with tailored surveys. These include – 

• I am proud to tell others I work for XXX
• I would like to be working for XXX in 12 months time
• I would recommend XXX as a place to work to friends and family

Overall, The Survey Initiative believes the best types of employee engagement survey questions are the ones that produce the most accurate results, and you can’t achieve accurate results unless you are asking the right questions. Unlike others, The Survey Initiative creates bespoke surveys to help better your company. If you want to learn more about the best types of employee engagement survey questions and this sounds like something that could help you, the first step is to get in touch.