Employee engagement surveys are about more than measuring employee satisfaction. Our research has identified 14 drivers of employee engagement your survey needs to capture the most valuable data.
Blaise Radley
Editorial Strategist
Workday
More than ever, employee engagement, company reputation, and success are directly linked. That’s why the questions your company asks to survey employee engagement are crucially important.
The Edelman Trust Barometer showed that 40% of the 33,000 people surveyed ranked employees as the most important ingredient to long-term company success, compared to the 34% who said customers. But without reliable survey results, how can businesses know what their employees are thinking?
Over the course of this article, we’ll explain our unique survey methodology and how to promote high engagement across your business. First, we’ll define the key terms surrounding engagement surveys. Then, we’ll outline the 45 core questions we use to measure employee engagement.
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Employee engagement is defined as the level to which employees feel a connection to their company and its culture. Engaged employees consistently go above and beyond in their work out of a shared belief in the success of the organization.
In turn, that boost in creativity and commitment translates into better customer experiences. However, engagement isn’t just about work and performance. It also covers employee expectations, such as whether an employee:
40% of people surveyed ranked employees as the most important ingredient to long-term company success, compared to the 34% who said customers.
It’s important that we distinguish between employee engagement surveys and employee satisfaction surveys. While there is an overlap between the two, employee satisfaction is best seen as the emotional component of employee engagement.
Measuring employee engagement properly requirest two key factors: a regular cadence and a personalised question set. Our platform calculates the correct questions to send each employee. If an employee scores strongly in one area, our smart algorithm automatically adds follow-up questions to provide richer detail.
All of those survey questions are answered on a scale of zero to 10. That gives businesses the flexibility to either measure engagement and its drivers as a mean score out of 10 (to one decimal place) or to use the employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) scoring system. To provide more detail, Workday Peakon Employee Voice also allows employees to provide confidential written feedback.
The first step toward improving employee engagement is measuring it. To measure employee engagement, we calculate a mean score based on an average of the four questions listed below.
1. “Advocacy” outcome question: How likely is it you would recommend [company name] as a place to work?
2. “Loyalty” outcome question: How likely is it that you would stay with [company name] if you were offered the same job at another organization?
3. “Satisfaction” outcome question: Overall, how satisfied are you working for [company name]?
4. “Belief” outcome question: How likely is it that you would recommend [company name]’s products or services to friends and family?
Measuring employee sentiment isn’t as simple as asking employees how engaged they are at work. Our research shows that to measure employee sentiment a more extensive series of questions is required.
The basis for the 45 employee engagement questions in Workday Peakon Employee Voice are 14 psychological categories. They represent employee sentiment across a range of experiences, job and role characteristics, cultural factors, and motivators.
These 14 categories strongly correlate with employee engagement outcomes across different cultures and industries, and are hence termed “drivers” of engagement. Each driver has an overview question and most also include “subdrivers,” designed to unearth more granular feedback.
Engaged employees consistently go above and beyond in their work out of a shared belief in the success of the organization.
These questions measure the amount that each employee feels they achieve on a daily basis. A sense of accomplishment has been shown to directly impact employee retention.
Measuring autonomy in relation to employee engagement concerns is focused on an employee’s ability to get their work completed on their own terms. Every employee should feel comfortable making work decisions by themselves.
This section concerns the impact of physical workplaces on engagement. A recent PwC study found that 87% of employees believed the office was important for collaborating and building relationships. As the way we collaborate in person continues to evolve, the questions below are only growing in importance.
These driver questions reveal whether employees are free to express their opinions without fear of negative consequences. The focus on freedom of opinions in our employee engagement survey stems from the need for psychological safety.
If employees don’t understand what qualifies as successful performance, anxiety can set in. These questions establish how employees feel about the work they are expected to do.
These questions relate to how employees perceive the level of workplace opportunity, both in terms of career development and personal growth. Our Employee Expectations Report found that 8% of employees’ comments were related to growth.
Management support focuses on the quality of the relationship between employees and their direct managers. Rather than an opportunity for teams to critique their managers, this is a safe space for dialogue between the two.
A PwC study found that 87% of employees said the office was important for collaborating with team members and building relationships.
These questions focus on whether employees consider their work to be valuable, both to themselves and to the company. Meaningfulness was outlined in Kahn’s employee engagement theory as the feeling that one’s work is worthwhile, useful, and valuable.
Organizational fit centers on the idea that an individual not only influences their work environment but is influenced by it. These questions focus on whether employees believe the values of the organization match their own.
These questions cover the 10th driver of engagement: The health of an employees’ relationships within the organization. That can cover everything from how employees view their colleagues professionally to whether there are adequate social opportunities within the office.
This segment of the engagement survey reveals how strongly employees believe that their work is valued by the organization. Recognition is a strong component of Hackman and Oldham’s job characteristics model.
These questions reveal how satisfied employees are with their total compensation. Equity theory states that employees are motivated when their inputs are matched by outcomes: pay, bonuses, benefits, and recognition from managers. Ensuring your staff feels that their performance is adequately compensated is key.
The penultimate driver covers the degree to which employees understand and agree with a company’s overall strategy. Without the proper tools and resources in place to promote positive workplace communication, it’s easy for strategy scores to decline.
The final driver examines whether employees feel the amount of work they’re responsible for is reasonable. Psychologists Maslach, Schaufeli, and Leiter cite engagement as the opposite of employee burnout.
Understanding the drivers of engagement and the question sets that drive them is just the beginning. In order to capture valuable employee sentiment data, it's essential that you're able to draw out valuable insights and benchmark your findings against the marketplace.
At Workday, our survey platform does all that and much more, powered by natural language processing technology. Learn more about how Workday Peakon Employee Voice can provide your organization with critical insights into employee sentiment.
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This article has been updated since it was first published in February 2020.
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