Motivating Employees Through Employee Engagement Surveys

There are many survey tools available to assess employee engagement in your organization. This article provides ideas and activities to engage your employees through two simple and interactive employee surveys. These surveys will provide you with feedback about employee motivation and offer paths forward for increased engagement.

Survey 1: Defining Employee Engagement

To build employee engagement, it is important to know how your employees define it. In this survey, ask individuals or a team to:

  • Define employee engagement
  • List 10 activities that contribute to positive employee engagement
  • List 5 recent examples where you saw someone support employee engagement on this team

You can either review individual response for engagement ideas, or have the team compare lists and develop a consensus list that can shape engagement activities moving forward. Ultimately, the outcome of this exercise is a list of most commonly cited engagement activities, and action plan to make sure that they are either implemented or continued in the team or organization. The list of examples may also form the basis for a recognition program to acknowledge the people who took actions that engaged others.

Survey 2: SWOT Analysis

Often used as a strategic planning tool, a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) can also be used to survey employee engagement. Ask a team to brainstorm responses to the following questions:

  • Strengths: What is our team/organization doing well when it comes to employee engagement?
  • Weaknesses: What employee engagement elements could we improve on?
  • Opportunities: What could we do to meaningfully increase employee engagement?
  • Threats: What do we risk by not actively engaging employees?
  • Action Planning: What actions should we take based on responses to the questions above?

Like the first survey, these questions can be asked at an individual level, or can be done at a team level. The benefit of individual responses is that it may provide more candid feedback. The benefits of a team response is that it helps build team culture and transparency.  You may also do this in two parts – collect individual responses and consolidate them for a team ranking and action planning session.

These two simple surveys can provide significant insights about employee engagement – what it looks like and how to achieve it. Periodically repeating the surveys will also remind employees that employee engagement is not a static state – it evolves as the organization changes, and as employees grow with it.