The end of the year means most employers are thinking about 3 things: open enrollment, performance reviews, and employee engagement. The latter one in this list sometimes takes a backseat to the other two, but receiving annual feedback from your team showing how engaged they feel at work is an important part of your ability to retain your best people and evolve in the right ways. As we start to think about setting business goals for 2026, Employee Engagement is top of mind for us as HR people. Here are 6 tips to help you get the most out of engagement surveys:
1. Keep things anonymous if you want to get really good feedback. There are a number of survey platforms that offer this feature, but it’s not always included with a base level subscription, so read the fine print. When you ensure people they can speak freely and anonymously, you’re more likely to get a honest feedback on how everyone really feels, and you’re also more likely to get specific details, ideas, and insights about meaningful changes people would like to see.
2. Question design matters a lot. There are many models to choose from and we even have a friendly disagreement among our team over whether Gallup Surveys or Likert Surveys are the better choice. A 5-Point Likert Scale with open ended questions at the end is one of our top choices for employee engagement surveys, and so is the traditional 12-Question Gallup Survey which is backed by some great research. These are both solid design choices, but it’s the questions you ask that really get into the “meat” of how your employees feel. Partner with your HR leader to identify which style of survey makes the most sense for your business and to determine what questions you’ll ask.
3. Look at the data and focus on trends. As hard as it is not to be swayed by one comment that might get stuck in your head, it’s important to not let this skew your perception. One unhappy person, or one brutal critique is not a trend, so keep the data and the consensus in mind when you’re determining what to focus on. This is particularly important to think about if you include open ended questions in your survey because this is where you’ll find these comments. But if you do see several harsh comments that relate to the same thing, then this is something to notice.
4. Remember that “engagement” is about how your employees feel about working for your company over time. This is more complex than you might think and it’s not to be confused with employee “satisfaction” which is more about how someone feels at a specific point in time…and is often dependent on someone’s mood, or whether they had a good day or a bad day. Employee Engagement really gets at the heart of what someone’s experience is like to work for you over time. A great example we often use for this is to think about when a phone call comes in at 5:01 on a Friday, do you pick up the phone or not? Engaged employees pick up the phone at 5:01, even if they had a rough day. And research shows that engaged employees are more resilient and demonstrate a higher level of commitment and connection. They do the right thing.
5. Question consistency is important if you want to compare results. In order for you to determine how this year stacked up to last year, then you have to ask the same questions every year. This is a really important and often overlooked aspect of employee engagement surveys. If you ask different questions every year, then you can’t reliably compare your performance and progress.
6. Don’t do an employee engagement survey if you’re not going to take any action from it. This sends a terrible message to your team. They took the time to give you all this great feedback, but if nothing came of it then what was the point? After your engagement survey data is in, the best course of action is to review it with your leadership team and then create an action plan that highlights the key themes from the survey and talks about what steps you’re going to take to address the trends that came up.
Have an HR or people question? Reach out to us by phone if you want to speak to a human, or by email or webchat if you want to start a virtual conversation. We love helping growing companies thrive and we’d love to hear from you!
