Employee engagement surveys are used by 92 percent of companies. This is to be expected, considering 80 percent of senior leaders rank employee engagement as a critical part of achieving business objectives. The traditional employee engagement survey looked for measurements of happiness and contentment in employees’ roles with questions like, “Do you feel you’ve received enough recognition?” But with new generations joining the workforce it’s time for a more updated employee engagement survey.
CEB Global found that the factors that truly drive employee performance are understanding and connecting to company goals, a commitment to coworkers, and having the right capabilities. These should be the prevailing topics that shape your employee engagement survey questions.
Understanding and Connecting to Company Goals
It turns out that 61 percent of senior executives claim that they’re struggling to bridge the gap between ideas and day-to-day implementation. Ask yourself if your employee engagement survey questions determine whether your employees try to work around your employee engagement strategy or work in a way that contributes to it.
A Commitment to Coworkers
High performing employees learn from and teach each other. Strong group performance should be encouraged alongside strong individual performance. Ask yourself if your survey questions will help you understand if your employees are collaborating effectively together.
The Right Capabilities
This factor alone has 3 times the impact that commitment to change has. CEB research shows that employees with high commitment levels but low capability are 18 percent more likely to suffer from change-related stress and poor performance. Ask yourself if your employee engagement survey questions evaluate your employees’ capabilities and make them aware of the necessity of those capabilities.
Employee engagement surveys are an ideal way to keep up with what is truly going on among your workforce. Be sure to adapt your survey questions to your team in order to get a clear picture of where you all stand in terms of company goals, coworkers, and capabilities, and where you can improve on those.
A great way to assess employee capabilities is with the TalassureM, our insightful employee assessment for all stages of the employee lifecycle.
