Employee engagement is more than just a buzzword. It’s a crucial underpinning of any successful organization. Engaged employees are more likely to be motivated, productive, and have greater retention. Indeed, multiple analyses have found positive connections between employee engagement and important performance outcomes.
So how do we work toward nurturing more engaged teams? The first step is to assess the status quo. Understanding how engaged or disengaged our team members are can help us begin to uncover opportunities for improvement.
Conducting a brief employee engagement survey is a great way to get insights—with only a small commitment of your time. Here’s how:
- Create a short, focused survey. Include meaningful, closed-ended questions that assess your team’s engagement levels. For example, consider these yes/no statements, and look to the bottom of this post for additional resources to help you write your questions:
- I receive the support I need to succeed from my manager.
- At work, my opinions seem to count.
- The mission or purpose of my organization makes me feel my job is important.
- I know what is expected of me at work.
- Distribute the survey, allowing anonymous responses. You can use online tools like Google Forms, Qualtrics, Survey Monkey, or other similar platforms. Alternatively, you can simply email the questions, and team members can type in their answers, then print the file and put it in a drop box.
- Collect and analyze the responses. Once you have the surveys in hand, assess the information that your team has provided. Keep an eye out for trends or patterns, such as one specific question that elicits particularly positive or negative feedback.
Next steps
Once you’ve had a chance to review the survey responses, focus on areas that emerge as possible opportunities for improvement. For example, if career development seems to be a common issue, explore ways of training and helping employees grow, including mentoring programs like AVMA’s MentorVet Connect and support for team members to pursue CE in their areas of interest.
You also can share the overall survey results with your team, ask them to choose which area(s) they would like to focus on to boost engagement, then together come up with a plan to achieve that goal.
Survey resources
Use these additional resources to help identify the questions you want to include in your own survey: