Employee surveys are a great tool for collecting feedback from team members. By asking the right open-ended employee engagement survey questions, you can measure performance and satisfaction.
An employee survey is a tool that allows businesses to gather staff feedback so that they can measure employee performance, morale, and engagement.
Answers to open-ended employee engagement survey questions tend to be given anonymously, enabling business owners and managers to use the results to make proactive changes that will improve employee engagement.
Employee surveys come in all shapes and sizes. Whichever type of survey you choose, you can use ContactMonkey to add star ratings, emoji reactions, yes/no, thumbs up/down, and more to your internal communications to gather employee feedback.
Employee Survey Benefits
Employee surveys have a few key benefits. These include:
- Measuring employee engagement
- Giving your employees a voice and making their opinions feel valued
- Benchmarking the data you acquire for comparison purposes
- Fostering organizational growth by making informed changes
- Getting a feel for the overall mood at your workplace
To garner these benefits, you need to conduct your employee surveys effectively, making sure that you ask all of the right questions.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at open-ended employee engagement best practices in further detail, including key questions that you should ask.
Employee Survey Best Practices
It’s important to implement open-ended employee engagement survey question best practices so that you can increase the effectiveness of your surveys. These include:
- Reviewing and auditing the survey process to make continual improvements
- Demonstrating management commitment
- Making sure all internal communications are clear and concise
- Defining roles and responsibilities
- Allocating enough resources to employee surveys.
The last tip is particularly important. Unless your surveys feel personal and tailored to each and every team at your workplace, your respondents might either skip the questions or answer them thoughtlessly.
One way to make your employee surveys more engaging is to use the “one question at a time” approach. Pulse survey questions are a great way to gather focused employee feedback around a particular issue without overwhelming your employees. these can be simple yes/no questions or questions that ask for written responses:
Types of Open-Ended Employee Engagement Survey Questions
Now that we’ve provided you with some of the employee survey best practices you should implement, let’s take a look at the employee survey questions you need to include.
Management Questions
It’s important to ask questions about the work environment. This can help you get an understanding of your employees’ real day-to-day experience on the job. Do they enjoy it? Are team motivation levels high? Is there a need to improve employee morale? Are there any obstacles that are making it difficult for people to perform within the current environment?
It’s good to have a mix of open and closed-ended questions. Open-ended employee engagement survey questions give employees the chance to share their feelings, while closed questions are simple to answer.
Here are a few examples of the management questions you should ask:
Does your management team set clear objectives?
This question will indicate if managers are giving clear direction to their team. Having goals makes employees feel as though they are working towards a common goal and succeeding together. Not having shared goals is a big factor in employee disengagement, so it’s important to find out if managers are creating a productive and encouraging environment.
Pro Tip: Organize and segment employee sending lists to target the right employees with the right questions using ContactMonkey’s list management tool.
On a scale of 1 to 10, how effective is your direct supervisor at recognizing the contributions you make in the workplace?
Everyone wants to know that their hard work is appreciated. This question will indicate if managers are effective at giving feedback and recognizing individual efforts. This question can help you develop new employee recognition ideas.
On a scale of 1 to 10, how comfortable do you feel giving feedback to your manager?
This is an important question to ask if you want to find out whether managers are approachable and open to feedback and improvement themselves. For a team to be effective, it’s important for all members (including the manager) to have open and honest communication amongst each other.
Personal Growth And Satisfaction Questions
You should also be asking open-ended employee engagement survey questions related to personal growth. These are designed to provide insights into the improvements the individual has made, and whether they’re still on a path towards growth.
Many people end up leaving their jobs because they feel like they are in a dead-end role and there are no opportunities for further development. That’s why personal growth questions are critical, helping you to boost employee engagement and retention.
Examples of some of the personal growth and satisfaction questions you should ask:
Have you accomplished any career goals in the last six months? If so, please write them down.
This question will help determine if employees are feeling satisfied and challenged in their role and if they are accomplishing their goals. It also gives you the opportunity to find out if they have achieved their professional objectives. And if they haven’t, it would help guide them to an understanding of how they can start progressing faster.
On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate your work-life balance? What do you think are the three most important contributing factors?
Work-life balance has an impact on employee retention and overall productivity. If work-life balance is out of sync, you can collaborate with your employee to find ways to improve it.
What motivates you to go the extra mile at work? Tell us about some of your motivation triggers.
Find out what really drives your employees to put in 110% of their effort, so you can learn how to keep them motivated. If you find out that your team’s motivation levels are low, this question will give you some ideas on how to bring their energy back.
Improvement Questions
Finally, you need to ask open-ended survey questions to employees about improvement. This is simple: you want to find out what can be done to improve your company.
Examples of some improvement questions you should ask:
Are there any issues with our company culture?
Your company culture makes a huge difference in terms of employee satisfaction levels, onboarding new employees, and branding. Therefore, it’s vital to find out what issues your employees may see with your company culture at present.
How can we enhance your engagement in the workplace?
Directly ask your employees if there is anything you can do to make them more engaged in the workplace.
Is there anything else you would like to share that you find important to your employee experience?
This is a vital question, as you’re keeping the door open and allowing employees to express themselves freely about how they’re feeling.
Get In-Depth Feedback with Open-Ended Employee Engagement Survey Questions
So there you have it: everything that you need to know about open-ended employee engagement survey question best practices.
Employee surveys can be a valuable tool in terms of gauging and improving employee engagement rates, as well as making impactful changes to your organization based on the feedback that you receive.
Combined with other employee engagement apps and tools like employee satisfaction surveys, your internal communications can help highlight the importance of employee engagement at your company.
However, in order to really reap these benefits, you need to make sure that you ask the right employee survey questions and implement best practices. A tool like ContactMonkey can maximize the engagement you get on your employee surveys, and help you find the best times to send internal emails.
With ContactMonkey, you can easily make employee surveys an integral part of your company culture. Book a free demo to learn how ContactMonkey can improve employee engagement:
