Expect more from your employee engagement platform

The best employee engagement surveys are typically the most in-depth studies in an employee experience feedback program. Because it’s important to measure both a full set of engagement drivers and a comprehensive set of drivers in multiple dimensions, this is a study that offers plenty of valuable results through analysis in an employee engagement platform. However, this also means it takes a bit longer to complete. Keep this in mind when you’re creating an employee engagement survey and when you’re designing your engagement survey schedule. If you’re going to launch a full questionnaire to everyone all at once, just send it once a year – at the most, twice a year. Of course, you need time to analyze results and act on what you learn, so give yourself a chance to get the work done. If you choose to split up sections of the study or launch to different groups at different times of the year, you may build more of a continuous feedback program. Keep in mind, though: Employee engagement studies are generally different than simple pulse checks, although the best employee engagement survey software will allow you to run both kinds of employee feedback programs simultaneously. When you’re checking out employee engagement survey providers, find out whether their employee engagement survey pricing includes the flexibility to run other types of survey projects, too.

Choose employee engagement survey software that offers both a strong starting point and the flexibility to learn as you go. For example, the best employee engagement survey software comes fully loaded with employee engagement survey templates or lets you design with AI can help you get up and running quickly. If, however, your current engagement survey providers limit your ability to choose your own questions, distribution schedule, or report types, keep looking! Communicate to your team before you launch any survey so they know why you’re doing the study and how results will be used. From there, start with a basic template fully vetted by your team and begin to collect baseline data.

It’s simple: Do something with the results! If your employees see your team member engagement survey program as a pointless exercise in which responses are never read, they’ll disregard it as a waste of time. The more employees see you sharing results and doing something about what you’ve learned from your employee engagement platform, the more motivated they will be to continue sharing feedback. You might include trends or selected results in internal employee newsletters, highlight employee-inspired changes in all-hands meetings, and even work engagement survey learning successes in your external blogs and marketing. After all, who doesn’t want to work with a company that listens and learns? 😊

A quick answer? Engagement surveys are longer and pulse surveys are short – but yes, there’s a bit more to it than that! The best employee engagement surveys are in-depth measures that cover a lot of different topics and result in important, actionable takeaways for an organization’s leadership team. For most people engagement survey distribution happens once or maybe twice per year. However, pulse surveys are run much more frequently – perhaps once a week, month, or quarter. These might ask a high-level question (How’s it going?) to track a simple metric over time. In some cases, though, organizations prefer to use pulse surveys for employee engagement, breaking up key dimensions over time or across different groups. Pulse employee engagement surveys might include that same key metric question and incorporate other dimensions, too – like communication, leadership, and recognition. Pulse engagement surveys offer a different perspective, spreading the insights over time or across groups. Remember that if you’re measuring satisfaction with communication one month and leadership the next, this is a bit of apples-to-oranges comparison. The same holds true if you’re measuring the engagement of a different team each month. Whichever path you choose, make sure you’re analyzing the data with the complete context in mind.