Employee engagement surveys are a great way to get insights into how your employees are feeling, and identify areas of improvement.
However, employee surveys only work well when the feedback and data is representative of the majority of your team. To do this you need to get a great response rate by increasing employee survey participation.
Launching employee engagement surveys with great response rates requires planning and clear communication with your teams. But it needn’t be a daunting task! We’ve broken it down into five simple steps…
When deciding what questions to include in your employee survey, try to put yourself in your employee’s shoes. You want to help boost employee engagement, so make sure your teams are front of mind for your survey creation and launch. Get a balance between questions that focus on the organisation and on how your teams are feeling so that you can get actionable insights that create change that matters. Understanding how your employees are feeling will play a massive part in improving their engagement and making them feel valued.
It can be tempting to ask broad questions when you’re planning your employee surveys. But if you know there’s an area of employee engagement that could be improved, this is your chance to find out! By confirming how your employees feel about particular topics, you’ll have the confidence to implement change backed by their responses. The more specific your questions are, the easier it is to create an action plan from the results!
If you’re just getting started, make your pulse survey relevant to change you know can be created quickly. Start small if needs be! By implementing change based on your team’s responses, they’ll see the difference their feedback can make and will be encouraged to take part in the next one.
The build-up to your launch is just as important as the day your employee engagement survey goes live. Your employees may be hesitant to take part if they aren’t familiar with the system you’re using for your surveys. Equally, if you haven’t explained why you’re introducing your surveys, when employees need to answer by, and how you’ll be using their feedback, your employees won’t understand how important their participation is which will affect your participation rate. By setting aside time to communicate this ahead of your survey launch, your employees will build more confidence in sharing how they really feel and will be more likely to provide feedback.
Communication is key when introducing surveys to your organisation. And it’s important to start this before launch day. By giving your employees the full picture before your first survey goes live, you’re more likely to have their trust when the survey hits their inbox. And creating a build-up will encourage more of a buzz by the time the survey launches.
If you’re using software like Stribe to share your survey, use branded posters and visual aids to help promote the tool and your survey. This will raise awareness and reassure your teams that it’s a trusted platform, backed by your organisation. Promoting the tool will mean the survey becomes familiar to them, helping to minimise any uncertainty on launch day.
You can also share links to your survey via your internal channels like Teams, Slack, email – whatever platform your teams use the most!
Throw a breakfast in the office to celebrate the launch and promote employee engagement. This will bring people together and help to get people talking and spread the word.
Engage with your team leaders ahead of time, so that they can help to promote employee engagement surveys during meetings and address any questions their teams’ might have.
We’ve already mentioned this one but if there’s one thing you take away from this blog, let it be communication. Your employees are unlikely to take part in something they don’t have an awareness of. If they receive your survey and don’t understand why they should participate, you’re unlikely to receive a strong response rate. Communicating the when, where, why, and how of your survey will help you increase employee survey participation overall!
Sometimes all it takes is one email to get the responses flowing, but if your employees are having a busy week it’s easy for your survey to slip into the depths of their inbox. Give your employees an extra nudge over the following weeks to remind them to take the time to respond. So, how do you remind someone to complete a survey? If you’re using Stribe, you can send reminders straight from the pulse tab.
With more and more of our teams working away from their desks, it’s important to consider the accessibility of your surveys. Increasing accessibility to your survey will help you engage with your hard-to-reach employees. Try sharing survey links within your internal channels (like Teams) and ask managers to send them to their teams.
If your teams are more likely to respond to something on their phone, encourage them to download the apps. This will ensure they have the best user experience when responding to the survey! Using Stribe, you can even share your survey using QR codes, so that you can reach everyone, even those without email addresses.
You’ve launched your first survey and achieved the response rate you worked for! Now it’s time to look at the responses and create an action plan. Once your survey has ended, you have a window to analyse those responses and show your employees that you’ll use their insights to create meaningful change. These are just a couple more steps to making employee surveys a part of your teams’ every day!
Once your survey has ended, keep the momentum going by sharing the results with employees and letting them know any action you’ll be taking based on their feedback! This will create a feedback loop with your teams and gain buy-in for your next survey. Make sure you do this before launching another survey. If your employees know their survey participation leads to change, they’re more likely to engage in the next one.
Build a habit for your employees by scheduling your surveys for every month, quarter – whatever suits your organisation! By following the same steps, responding will become part of your teams’ routines.
Identify any key themes that came up in the first survey and use the next survey to find out more and dig deeper into their feedback. Using Stribe’s built-in Key Phrase Identifier, you can find these straight away without having to sieve through your text responses!
Consider creating a recurring survey that gives you a baseline to measure change against. By asking the same questions over a period of time, you can measure how your teams’ responses change based on the improvements you’re making!
About the author
Lucy Harvey, COO at Stribe, has 11+ years’ experience in purpose-driven leadership roles across health, wellbeing, internal communications, employee engagement, and marketing. She is passionate about creating workplaces where people are happy, fulfilled, and feel comfortable and safe to talk.
