Download this best practice employee engagement survey that accompanies Simon Birkenhead's book, Managing People.
Unless you understand how your employees feel about working in your team and organisation, you can't prioritise your actions as a manager. You won't know what's holding performance back, and you may not appreciate what's underpinning your employees' current efforts.
Running an Employee Engagement Survey will help you to benchmark your team or organisation against the pillars of high performance that Simon Birkenhead defines in his book, Managing People.
This page provides a best practice Employee Engagement Survey that you can download, adapt and execute yourself.
Question List
Your survey should ask questions that illuminate opinions and attitudes towards these six pillars of high performance that are covered in Managing People:
Employee motivation
Managerial effectiveness
Organisational leadership
Team culture
Compensation
Overall job satisfaction
Participants should be asked to answer each question with a score of 1 to 4, with 1 indicating they Strongly Disagree with the statement and 4 indicating they Strongly Agree with it.
A range of 1 to 4 is superior to the typical 1 to 5 scoring system typically used for questionnaires. With a 1 to 5 system it is easy for participants to choose 3, indicating they neither agree nor disagree with the statement. However, the reality is that people will generally always feel positive or negative towards an issue - it is very rare that they truly have no opinion either way. By forcing participants to choose either a negative opinion (1 or 2) or a positive opinion (3 or 4), you will gain a far more insightful view.
Because we always want a score of 4 (Strong Agree) to be a 'good' result (i.e. an indicator of strong employee engagement), each question should be phrased so that if the participant agrees with it then that is a positive result for employee engagement.
Submit the form below to download an example Employee Engagement Survey that Simon Birkenhead, author of the book Managing People, has used in the businesses he has led. You'll also gain access to an example online survey using these questions.