Employees are your organization’s most valuable resource. Creating an employee engagement survey can be a significant step if you’re trying to gauge your workforce's satisfaction, motivation, and overall well-being.
With a well-thought-out employee engagement survey, you can identify areas of improvement, boost productivity, and foster a positive work culture at your organization.
In this blog post, we’ll give you a step-by-step guide on how to create an employee engagement survey. Let’s get started!
What is an employee engagement survey?
An employee engagement survey is a questionnaire a company uses to understand how happy and motivated its employees are. It asks questions about job satisfaction, connection to the company's mission, and whether the right resources are available.
This survey can help your organization determine what's working well for your employees and what needs improvement. It can also reveal insights that help you create a better work environment for everyone.
What kinds of employee engagement surveys are there?
The best surveys are the ones that try to answer a single question. Since there are so many things you could check with your employees, many different types of employee engagement surveys exist.
For example, if you want to know your employee’s general satisfaction levels with your company, you could give them an employee satisfaction survey. You could also choose a training survey if you’ve recently invested in new training modules for your team. Here are the other types of employee surveys commonly used in organizations:
- Employee engagement survey: This measures the level of emotional connection, motivation, and satisfaction employees feel towards their jobs and the organization.
- Employee feedback survey: A tool to gather employees' opinions and suggestions on specific issues, projects, or organizational changes.
- Onboarding survey: Conducted during the initial weeks of employment, this survey helps organizations assess the efficacy of their onboarding process.
- Training needs assessment: Used to identify the learning needs of employees, enabling the organization to develop targeted training programs.
- Diversity and inclusion survey: Aims to assess the inclusivity and diversity awareness within the workplace, helping to create a more inclusive and equitable environment.
How to make an employee engagement survey on Google Forms
Here’s how you can make an employee engagement survey for your organization on Google Forms:
Step 1: Make a new Google Form
Navigate to your Google Forms. Click the Blank button (plus sign) to start a new form.
Add an appropriate title to the form. You can also write a short description outlining the nature of the form and its objectives. Instructions on how to answer the questions on the survey could also be included here.
Step 2: Add employee engagement questions
Before you start adding questions to your form, getting them down in one place is a great idea. While doing this, you should also decide on the format of those questions.
When you’re trying to gauge employee engagement, your objective will dictate everything. Your questions and their format will naturally flow from the purpose of your survey. For a general employee engagement survey, questions may include:
- Are you satisfied with your current role and responsibilities in the company? [Yes/No]
- Do you feel your work is valued by your supervisors and colleagues?
- Do you feel connected to the mission and goals of the organization?
- Do you have the necessary resources and tools to perform your job efficiently?
- Do you feel comfortable sharing your ideas and opinions with your team?
Binary questions give a broad picture of employee engagement in your organization. This kind of survey can also be used to identify potential employee issues by including some open-ended questions like:
- What obstacles or challenges do you encounter in your day-to-day work?
- Are there any changes you would suggest to improve the work processes or efficiency?
- How can we improve communication within the team/organization?
Suppose you’ve just implemented a few new policies in your organization. Your objective now is to generate quantifiable data and scores that can be compared with previous scores. All you have to do is change the format of the questions.
Rather than using binary questions with yes/no answers, use the linear scale format and phrase the questions accordingly. Linear scale lets you record subtle score changes over time and generates data about subjective topics.
Your questions could now be:
- On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with your current job?
- I feel motivated to give my best effort at work. [Strongly agree - strongly disagree]
- The work environment is conducive to productivity and collaboration. [Strongly agree - strongly disagree]
If you’re trying to record employee engagement related to an issue or a problem, your questions will be framed to gain more specific insight. For example, if you sense a lack of motivation or drive in your sales team and suspect a skill gap to be the main issue, your questions could be:
- Have you received sufficient training and support to improve your sales performance?
- How do you perceive the company's recognition and rewards program for sales achievements?
- How well do you think your skills are utilized in your current sales position?
Once you have all your questions, it’s time to start adding them to your form. Enter your question into the question field and click the button next to the question field to select the question format.
You can click the “Add question” button in the floating menu next to your form to add the next question. Add all your questions to your Google Forms.
Consider splitting up questions into sections
A comprehensive employee engagement survey will likely have questions spanning different aspects of the employees' roles and responsibilities. So consider splitting your form into different sections.
To do this, click the “Add section” button in the floating menu.
Step 3: Make the form anonymous
If you want to encourage genuine and honest employee responses, ensure anonymity in your employee engagement form. When answers are anonymous, employees feel more comfortable sharing their thoughts, concerns, and feedback without fearing repercussions.
The first step you can take to make your survey anonymous is to exclude any personal questions that would disclose the respondent’s identity. You can check the settings of your form and ensure that it’s not collecting email addresses by default. Read more about keeping Google Forms anonymous.
Step 4: Customize the theme to fit branding
Just because your form is used within the organization doesn’t mean it shouldn’t reflect your branding. You can easily add a logo to your Google Form in a few steps.
You can also customize your form's theme to reflect your brand’s colors. You can easily do this by clicking the “Customize theme” button in the top right corner. This will open up a side panel where you can change different elements like font, colors, and header of your form theme.
With that, your employee engagement survey is done! Before sending it out to your employees, there’s just one last thing to do.
Step 5: Decide how responses will be stored and shared
Your responses are automatically stored in your Google Forms. You can access them in your Google Sheets as well. Learn how to access your form submissions.
However, this isn’t the best way to access your form responses. Further, since it’s an employee engagement survey, you may want to route the submissions through other colleagues or seniors.
There’s one tool that does both jobs effectively, and that’s Form Publisher!
Keep responses organized with Form Publisher!
Form Publisher is an add-on for Google Forms that creates a document whenever someone fills in your form. What’s more, you can choose to save these documents as individual responses in your preferred destination and also share them automatically with other stakeholders. Organizing responses is the first step to analyzing and effectively gauging their insights, and Form Publisher lets you do just that! Interested? Explore Form Publisher!