In the height of the pandemic, many business owners are worried about meeting their quarterly quotas, hitting the appropriate numbers, or just being able to pay the necessary bills. But what about your employees? What about the people that are making all those other things possible?
The COVID-19 pandemic hit everybody hard. In a recent KFF poll, nearly half (45%) of adults in the United States reported that their mental health has been negatively impacted due to worry and stress over the virus. Your employees are not immune to these feelings.
Laws have been set in place to ensure employee and customer safety, but you are responsible for keeping your employees engaged and motivated during these hard times.
Employee Engagement Surveys
Your employees are your essential workers. They represent your business with every customer visit, every customer support transaction, and every sale. Throughout the entirety of your customer’s journey, your employees are responsible for making sure your customer’s needs are met.
The best way to help support your employees is through employee engagement surveys. Surveys like this can provide deep insights into what drives engagement in your organization. This can help shine a light on areas your employees might be lacking due to the added stress of COVID-19 and the mandated quarantine.
Companies have a good shot at keeping their employees satisfied and retained with the help of employee engagement surveys. They do so by identifying and working on weaknesses, improving strengths, and figuring out how to improve employee engagement by capitalizing on opportunities.
The million-dollar question becomes, “How do you determine, measure, and maintain employee engagement?”
What Questions to Ask Employees
First, make sure the goal of your employee engagement survey is clear. Are you looking for areas of weakness? Or maybe you’re looking for opportunities for growth and improvement. Whatever the goal is, it must be clear before you can determine the right questions to ask.
It’s also important to determine the indicators you’re trying to measure. You can measure your goals by setting the right indicators. Whether it is employee engagement, commitment, satisfaction, or performance, choose to measure what you’re looking to achieve.
Asking the right questions is important. In order to measure the indicators you’re looking for, your questions must be clear and concise. Keeping questions short without implied answers provides the best results. Avoid addressing two subjects in the same question. Doing so confuses the reader, forcing them to give inaccurate answers.
Questions about personal growth, the company, management efficiency, and the work environment are all great questions to include in your employee engagement survey.
Encourage Employee Feedback
In addition to asked questions, allow your employees to offer their feedback as well. It will take some effort, but leaders should always be encouraging employees for feedback – its how companies grow!
Creating a culture of trust can aid in collecting ample and effecting feedback. Respond to your employees’ feedback to make sure they are comfortable sharing their thoughts. Even if you can’t do anything about the situation, acknowledging the comment means you are listening, which makes your employees feel heard and valued (which they should be!)
Administering Employee Engagement Surveys
Administering your well-crafted employee engagement surveys can pose a new challenge. Emails are fine, but they get buried under more important emails and eventually forgotten. Remember, you want your employees to participate. Making the survey quick and more entertaining than an email is a great way to boost participation.
Mobile surveys are a great option for employee engagement collection. Mobile surveys can be placed in the most convenient places about the office without being an eyesore. Survey dashboards provide real-time results so improvements and opportunities can be controlled on a daily basis. Kiosks are confidential and allow employees to submit their answers and feedback anonymously.
Mobile surveys are undoubtedly more entertaining and engaging than an email, thus encouraging more participation. Leaders can review results at any time, as often as necessary. Questions are easily changed to produce different results and learn new information. Mobile surveys are also easily transported so they can move about the office to ensure all departments and all employees are participating.
Why It’s Important to Invest in Employee Engagement Surveys Now
Low employee engagement is a costly problem. On average, it can cost a business $4,129 to hire new talent and $986 to onboard new hires. This means each time an unhappy employee leaves, it costs a business $5,000 in addition to the loss of a talented and experienced employee.
Employee engagement is important to overall workplace morale. Engaged employees outperform their peers that are not engaged. Overall, companies with high employee engagement are 21% more profitable.
Additionally, employee engagement reduces absenteeism! A Gallup study shows that highly engaged workplaces displayed 41% lower absenteeism over workplaces with less engaged employees. A team that shows up, steps up! They hit their numbers and they keep your business alive.
Pandemics are scary and stressful, but there are ways you can keep your employees engaged and motivated so everyone makes it through successfully. Employee engagement surveys help to identify those opportunities and make the best of an undesirable time.
