10 benefits of employee engagement surveys

What is employee engagement?

When we talk about employee engagement we’re talking about how connected your people feel to their work and to your organisation. Why should you care? Well, we’ve actually written a whole blog post about employee engagement, but to cut a long story short, there are loads of benefits of understanding and improving your employee engagement. Read on to find out more…

What is an employee engagement survey?

An employee engagement survey aims to measure, understand and quantify employee experience. This differs from workplace happiness surveys in that there are different drivers behind engagement and happiness. This is key to understand and improve employee engagement. 

There are lots of different ways to survey your people to understand their engagement. Our platform allows you to combine many different employee engagement surveys. We allow you to dive deeper into the engagement of your people throughout their employee lifecycle from their onboarding to exit interviews, regular surveys in between, plus always-on listening. 

What are the benefits of employee engagement surveys?

1. Improve people retention

2. Improve employee turnover

3. Improve customer experience

4. Improve employee engagement

5. Improve brand experience

6. Improve your P&L

7. Get buy in for your people strategy

8. Find quick wins for your business

9. Improve employee safety

10. It’s the right thing to do

1. Improve people retention

Understanding what your people want and need can give you great insights into how you can support all your people to thrive within your organisation. When people do not feel engaged within their organisation, they’re more likely to start looking elsewhere for the culture, benefits, or recognition that they don’t feel like they’re receiving within your organisation. 

We all know that losing an employee can have an outsized impact on an organisation. Managing the exit process, recruiting a replacement and onboarding a new team member has a big effect on HR teams and the wider organisation alike. Especially when you’re losing a particularly talented or influential individual. Not to mention the fact that we’ve all worked in organisations where even just one person leaving starts a cascade which turns into a turnover problem. 

Improve your retention rates by understanding what your people are feeling through the use of always-on listening and action planning.

2. Improve employee turnover

When turnover starts to become a problem this has an impact on the wider organisation. As more people leave, organisations often see dissent and dissatisfaction spreading throughout their people even within teams far removed from affected groups. By listening to your people and acting on the feedback from engagement surveys you can nip this kind of widespread problem in the bud before it gets out of hand.

Only through listening can you understand when there is a ground swell of negative feeling and adjust your comms to support your people and increase feelings of safety. Not only this, but our platform also allows you to use what we call our 'Close the Feedback Loop' tool to enter into conversations with concerned staff while maintaining anonymity.

3. Improve employee experience

Simply by asking for your people’s input in the form of employee engagement surveys shows your commitment to understanding what your team thinks and and how they feel. Although for maximum and sustained impact, this will need to be accompanied by a robust action plan. Nevertheless, by gathering data on the unique needs of the individuals within your organisation you can create a people plan with maximum impact. 

It’s impossible to please everyone all the time, but by involving your people through asking for their input, you’re more likely to create a programme that works for your team, and also create good will for if your offering falls short of what particular individuals want or need. 

4. Improve employee engagement

Inevitably by asking for your people’s input you will be engaging them in the process. Of course, a single one off survey may not improve people’s engagement long term. But by creating a regular rhythm of listening and feedback, you will be able to bring everyone along with you when it comes to a wider employee engagement programme. 

We believe that an employee engagement survey programme without listening is doomed to fail. Of course, there are many ways to listen to your people. But other methods such as gathering feedback individually or through employee action groups or management, do not always guarantee anonymity. This is why we believe in giving every individual a voice while ensuring their feedback is anonymous to guarantee candid responses, rather than ones that they think you want to hear. 

5. Improve brand experience

So far we’ve spent a long time talking about the impact within your organisation of surveying for employee engagement, but the truth is that the effects will be felt more widely. As you get a better understanding of what your people need to be more engaged with your organisation, you’ll also be able to improve your brand more widely.

This is because your people are probably the ones closest to your brand, and your greatest source of brand advocates. Within your employee engagement survey they’ll be able to highlight brand strengths for you to shout about externally, as well as shining light on areas for improvement. This will allow you to improve brand experience more widely for everyone. 

6. Improve your P&L 

We’ve gone for P&L for the title of this section, but you can easily substitute for your most critical financial metric. Whether you’re a charity with big funding goals, a not for profit needing to maximise a tight budget, or a company looking to improve your bottom line - employee engagement surveys can help. 

We’ve already seen a myriad of impacts your surveys will have on your organisation. Through these together you’ll be able to improve your business critical financial metrics. Study after study show that focus on employee engagement has an impact on financial success. 

7. Get buy-in for your people strategy

When you start to involve your team within the creation and feedback process of your people strategy, you will find that people aren’t just more engaged, they’ll be more invested in the success of the strategy. When people are involved in every step of the process they’re intrinsically going to want to see it come to fruition. 

When your whole team wants your programme to succeed, you’ll find not only is it easier to implement, but you’re guaranteed to have better results. We work with a range of organisations and see time after time that when people give their opinions, suggestions and feedback on a programme, it’s more impactful and more efficacious. 

8. Find quick wins for your business

Whatever your goals as an organisation, your people often have the answers to your biggest problems. By using an employee engagement survey to ask them what they think about your organisation as a whole, you’re likely to uncover weaknesses, but also solutions to problems. 

Many people are problem solvers at heart, but might not come to you with their solutions because they don’t know you want them. When asked we often see that people from different positions, levels, and functions of business come with ingenious solutions to problems. Sometimes ones that the HR team hadn’t ever considered. 

9. Improve employee safety

This one might not be applicable to your organisation, but we’ve seen that for many organisations an anonymous engagement survey can highlight safety issues of which HR teams were unaware. Whether it’s uncovering microaggressions through an EDI survey, or larger issues within an organisation by turning to your people and asking about their safety, you’ll be able to unearth small issues before they become destabilising problems. 

A wide-ranging, well-designed survey can really highlight safety issues for your people, whether physical or otherwise. Although we always recommend having a robust system in place for serious incidents and whistleblowing, having regular employee engagement surveys can prevent small issues escalating. 

10. It’s the right thing to do

Although this is the last point on our list it’s undoubtedly the most important. Looking after your people makes business sense, yes, but it’s also just a good thing to do. 

We’re all humans, which means that we all gain satisfaction by treating others well. Neuroscience shows us that we’re energetic being and we need positive relationships in our lives. If you’re reading this, you’re likely in an HR role, and we find that most people enter these kinds of careers because they care about people. By all means, share the business reasons with your board (we’ve got a handy downloadable business case too!) but remember that they’re people too. And they’ll probably want to do the right thing by your team.