5 Employee Engagement Survey Clichés You Should Avoid

Employee engagement surveys can be incredibly useful, but only insofar as employees actually want to participate. Incessant email reminders and a lack of transparency about the purpose and outcomes of surveys are not exactly great response motivators. More importantly, if a survey asks clichéd questions, they might yield answers that are of no real use to your understanding of employee engagement. So, how can businesses develop and manage surveys that produce meaningful engagement results? For starters, by avoiding the following five employee engagement survey clichés:

1. Stop asking staff whether they are “satisfied”  – According to an article in Forbes, questions about employee satisfaction are mild, safe, and does not offer a clear picture of true engagement at work: “If you want to know if employees will shout from the rooftops what a great employer you are, and whether they’re committed to giving 100% (both factors that constitute engagement), you have to ask.”

“The reason that 50% of companies ask ‘satisfied’ questions is that it’s really easy to get high scores. The question is so weak that it’s a very easy one to ace. And if you conduct employee engagement surveys to show off your high scores, then you probably want to ask really easy questions.”

2. Asking questions in an employee engagement survey that would be better suited to manager-employee touchpoint conversations – A surveys is not an alternative to in-person conversations between colleagues. According to TLNT, the following questions are best suited to manager-employee conversations than being asked and answered in a survey: “How is your work going? What do you need help with? What gets you out of bed in the morning? What do you think you would like to do next?”

3. Stop spamming staff with survey reminder messages – Reminders are useful but can be extremely annoying if someone has already done what they were asked to do – and spam certainly won’t inspire future responses. Keep reminders to a minimum, space them out, and consider sending reminders only to the list of people with outstanding responses.

4. Being unresponsive when survey feedback has been received – Don’t fall off the face of the Earth once employee engagement survey feedback has been collected. Inform your staff that you’ve heard what they’ve had to say, thank them for participating, let them know what will happen with their feedback and perhaps even offer an estimated time by when they can expect information on survey outcomes.

5. Managers and supervisors who do not act on survey feedback – It’s one thing to say “Thanks for the feedback, this is what we’ve found” (as per the previous point), but if an issue is identified in the survey and management does nothing to solve the problem, then employees might start to view employee surveys as useless and not worth responding to. Moreover, they might even start to feel that their opinions do not matter in the business, which could negatively affect engagement.

Constructing an employee engagement survey and receiving input from employees shouldn’t be difficult and shouldn’t be a frustrating experience for employees. Check out how Ezzely’s survey functionality could benefit your business and read our blog “Employee Rewards: Give your Employees what They Really Want” to explore how employee survey feedback could assist your business in keeping employees engaged.