You Can Measure Employee Engagement In Just 8 Questions
Employee engagement surveys can be simpler than you think.
I recently spoke with a small business owner who said, “I’d love to do an employee engagement survey, but that seems like a lot of work to take on right now. Maybe when things slow down.”
Spoiler alert — things never slow down.
He understood the importance of measuring employee engagement, and that research has shown high levels of engagement lead to things like lower turnover, increased productivity, and higher profitability.
These were all prerequisites for the continued growth of his business, and yet his gut reaction was that administering a survey and analyzing the results would be too much work.
I couldn’t blame him for feeling overwhelmed. I’ve seen plenty of well-intentioned companies over-complicate their employee engagement surveys.
But, it doesn’t have to be complicated at all. In fact, it can be quite the opposite.
You can implement an employee engagement survey at your company that is both valid and reliable by asking your employees just 8 questions.
The Research
Marcus Buckingham of the ADP Research Institute recently shared research that supports this in his latest book, Nine Lies About Work.
His research involved partnering with hundreds of organizations, dividing each organizations’ employees into two performance-based groups, and asking each group a laundry list of identical questions related to their experiences at work.
The first group of employees was comprised of those from “high-performing” teams and the second of those from “low or average-performing” teams.
Researchers then identified which statements consistently solicited answers from “high-performers” that significantly deviated from the answers of “low or average performers,” culminating in 8 statements predictive of highly engaged workers.
The 8 Questions To Ask
To administer your employee engagement survey, build an online survey that asks your employees to score the following 8 statements on a sliding scale from ‘strongly disagree’ to ‘strongly agree.’
- I am really enthusiastic about the mission of my company.
- At work, I clearly understand what is expected of me.
- In my team, I am surrounded by people who share my values.
- I have the chance to use my strengths every day at work.
- My teammates have my back.
- I know I will be recognized for excellent work.
- I have great confidence in my company’s future.
- In my work, I am always challenged to grow.
That’s it. That’s all you need to ask.
The more strongly your employees agree with these statements, the more engaged your workforce is.
The statements with the lowest levels of agreement are the ones you should focus on improving to increase engagement.
If you truly need to be able to slice the data in other ways, maybe you ask each employee to indicate what department or location they’re in from a dropdown menu. But the more you ask employees to disclose identifiable factors that could theoretically jeopardize their anonymity, the less likely you are to get responses reflective of their reality.
Why They Matter
These 8 questions boil down to two categories of the employee experience which Buckingham says we “need at work in order to thrive.” He categorizes these as “We experiences” and “Me experiences.”
“We experience” questions “deal with the elements of a person’s experience created in their back-and-forth interactions with others on the team” and include the odd-numbered statements above (#1, 3, 5, and 7).
“Me experience” questions “deal with the individual experience of work” and include the even-numbered statements above (#2, 4, 6, and 8).
Buckingham says of team leaders,
“We ask you to give us this sense of universality — all of us together — and at the same time to recognize our own uniqueness; to magnify what we all share, and to lift up what is special about each of us.
When you come to excel as a leader of a team, it will be because you've successfully integrated these two quite distinct human needs.”
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