It’s important to understand how your workforce is feeling. If they’re happy and motivated, they perform better. If they’re disheartened and unfulfilled, their performance will be impacted.

Employee engagement surveys are a useful tool to help you understand how happy and committed your employees are. As well as understanding how they feel about their roles.

BUT - what are the pros and cons of employee engagement surveys? And should you use them in your organisation?

In this post, we’re exploring the advantages and disadvantages of employee engagement surveys. So you can make an informed decision on how to implement them into your business.

Let’s dive in.

What is an employee engagement survey?

Companies use employee engagement surveys to gauge workforce sentiment. These surveys help assess the attitudes, motivation and overall satisfaction of employees. They help gauge how connected people feel towards their work. As well as towards the organisation’s goals, and their colleagues.

Employees will complete a series of questions, asking them about various aspects of their job. Surveys could also include feelings about the workplace environment and interactions with supervisors and coworkers.

What is the goal of an employee engagement survey?

With a reported 85% of employees not feeling engaged at work - it’s important to understand the sentiment of your team. The purpose of an employee engagement survey is to gather insights from your team members. These insights can help you understand current engagement levels and help identify areas where improvements can be made.

By analysing the survey responses, you can gain a clear understanding of employee morale. This will allow you to identify potential issues or areas of discontent. Using this information, you can make informed decisions to enhance workplace conditions and policies.

The information collected from these surveys can lead to targeted interventions aimed at increasing employee satisfaction, motivation and overall productivity.

Employee engagement surveys help to foster a culture of open communication and transparency. Employees will feel more empowered and valued if they’re given the chance to voice their concerns and suggestions.

Making sure your employees are engaged is important to help improve business productivity. When used correctly, employee surveys are a powerful tool to gain strong insights from your team. They can also identify areas for improvement. Taking action from survey results is what leads to more engaged employees.

However, poorly conducted engagement surveys can crush morale, dishearten people and sidetrack organisational goals.

Let's take a look at the pros and cons of employee engagement surveys. So you can decide how best to use them in your business.

Pros of Employee Engagement Surveys

Employee Empowerment

Employee engagement surveys have a special way of making employees feel important and heard. When employees take part in surveys, it shows that their thoughts matter and that their voices are valued. This is probably why 86% of employees want their employers to ask them for feedback throughout the year.

Sometimes, when employees join in these surveys, they end up feeling happier about their jobs and the work they do. This happens because when their opinions are considered, they feel motivated to do well and help the company succeed.

This sense of good feeling can help improve company-wide morale. Helping all teams and departments reach common goals.

Solve problems before they escalate

Employee engagement surveys can help identify small issues - before they become major problems.

You can use an employee survey to find out how your employees feel about their role, their team and the company as a whole. Employee surveys are only as good as the data you capture. So for best results, we would recommend allowing team members to answer these anonymously.

Once your workforce has completed the survey, you should be left with a gold mine of authentic insights. From here you'll want to assess the answers.

Are there common issues cropping up? How serious are they? Is the general sentiment positive or negative? Are issues site-wide, or isolated to specific departments?

Using these insights, you can take action to prevent small issues from snowballing into bigger problems across the entire company. By doing this you're able to prevent issues from negatively impacting employee morale and productivity. Highly engaged teams show 21% greater profit-earning potential than teams that are not engaged.

Gauge Employee Morale

An employee survey will provide you with a greater awareness of the morale levels of your employees. A survey will give you a much more complete understanding compared to surface-level assumptions. Simply guessing how happy your team members seem from interactions in the office, or chats in the tea room does not paint a full picture - although these anecdotal conversations do add some insight, so are valuable in their own way.

Anonymous staff surveys give deeper insights into how people feel, allowing colleagues to be more honest without the fear of kickback from management. The data will allow you to make the changes required to improve morale, or double down on what’s working.

Better Decision Making

Engagement surveys can help leaders and managers make informed, data-supported decisions. For example, if survey results show that staff feel unhappy due to poor communication in the organisation, leadership can fix that. They know the sentiment (unhappy). They know the issue (poor communication) so can take precise action.

When leadership and management listen to what the survey is telling them, and implement fixes to solve problems, workforce morale will improve. Employees are more likely to feel valued, important and happier. As a result, productivity and efficiency are likely to increase.

Pinpoint areas to improve

As mentioned above, surveys provide valuable management data. By conducting engagement surveys, you can identify the exact areas that are causing problems.

From here you can make informed decisions, using the example above, to improve morale and productivity.

Cost-effective

Workplace surveys are a relatively low-cost method of understanding how your employees feel about their role and workplace. There is some time resource required, for example, creating the survey initially (whether internally or using an external provider) and then allowing everyone time to complete the survey.

However, armed with your new insights, you can identify and address issues before they escalate, saving resources in the long run. You’re also preventing the loss of productivity further down the line, by identifying issues and taking action early. It's akin to proactive maintenance that prevents more significant challenges, leading to cost savings over time.

Think of having your car maintained. There might be a small cost associated that you feel is “wasting money”. But maintaining your car and resolving issues - before they become problems - will save you large repair bills in the future, and having to hire another car while yours is being fixed.

That being said, employee engagement surveys can range in complexity, depending on the needs and size of a company. The more complex – the more time spent and the more money it will cost.

Cons of Employee Engagement Surveys

So, we’ve covered the advantages of using employee engagement surveys.

But, there are some drawbacks to engagement surveys. It’s important to be aware of these, before jumping in and getting started.

Resource Drain

While employee engagement surveys offer valuable insights, they can sometimes become a resource drain for organisations. Designing, distributing and analysing surveys demands time and effort from both employees and management. If the decision to outsource this to a specialist agency in order to maintain confidentiality is taken, there’s a cost involved.

Survey Fatigue

If surveys are conducted too frequently, this can lead to "survey fatigue," where employees feel overwhelmed and less motivated to participate. This fatigue grows, particularly if organisations are not resolving issues being expressed by staff.

To mitigate this challenge, you should strike a balance between survey frequency and the value they provide. Ensure that your surveys are a constructive and useful tool, without overburdening resources. Make sure that action is taken as a result of every survey and communicate those actions to team members so they see that surveys = action = improvement!

That said, listening should not be an annual activity. Remember there’s more than one way to listen to colleagues and it doesn’t have to be a survey. Face-to-face is always the best form of communication, so also conduct listening groups. Listening Groups can offer really valuable insights - when done well.

There’s a place for both surveys and listening groups, as each has their own pros and cons and they complement each other.

Consider doing a listening group after you have the survey results to dig deeper into a particular issue and help you generate improvement ideas.

Insufficient Response Rate

If you’re going to put the effort in to running a survey, you want the results to be robust.

Make sure everyone is aware of the survey and that it is a chance for them to have their say. Promote the value of taking part by reminding them what happened as a result of the last survey.

If people have ‘survey fatigue’ (see above), you’ll get a low response rate, so don’t overdo surveys.

Make sure your survey is attractive for people to want to complete. Don’t make your survey too long. Ask yourself what you will do with the answer to every question. If the answer would just be nice to know and you won’t be taking action - don’t ask the question.

Anonymity Concerns

No matter how many times you indicate that your surveys are anonymous, you will always have staff that have a fear of reprisal if someone gives honest answers. This can be an issue in smaller teams and start-up businesses when the perception among employees may be that it’s easier to identify who wrote specific comments and trace them back to a certain person.

While the perception among employees may be that a survey can’t truly be anonymous, professional employee engagement surveys conducted by third parties with the intention of being anonymous, can ensure that data from respondents is not linked to personal identifiers. Reporting criteria also calls for a minimum number of responses to create a report, helping to ensure employees can remain unidentifiable and results are reported on collectively.

When conducting engagement surveys, it’s important to communicate your policies and procedures so that employees understand what you’re doing to maintain anonymity or confidentiality. But, regardless of how much you stress they will be anonymous, some employees will not trust that their answers will be anonymous. No matter how much proof you give them to the contrary. If staff fear their answers are not anonymous, they may not answer honestly.

If your colleagues do feel that way, you potentially have a bigger employee engagement issue that needs to be resolved. It points to lack of trust in leadership and lack of psychological safety.

Skewed Results

Data from surveys can result in inaccurate results and analysis. There are a few reasons for this. The most common is, too few people completing the survey - possibly due to survey fatigue as mentioned earlier.

Another is not asking good questions. Think carefully about every question:

Is your question actually two questions in one? If so, which one are they answering?
Could employees interpret the question differently? Consider testing the questions with a small mixed group.

Leading questions can also sway answers. It is best to have an independent party produce the survey questions to avoid this.

Decreased Morale

Coupled with staff survey fatigue, conducting employee engagement surveys can lower staff morale. How? By ignoring feedback and not taking action to resolve concerns raised.

This makes employees feel like their opinion is not valued - like they’re not important and are wasting their time.

The Truth Hurts

This isn’t so much a con, but it’s something to be aware of. If you think your company culture is great, you may be blindsided reading the results from a staff survey. It’s easy to feel angry or hurt when reading this, especially if you’re the business owner. But remember - remove your emotions and focus on the facts and the value they will add to your business.

If staff have taken the time to complete a survey - they still care about their role and the company. Turn these negatives into positives and see the feedback as constructive.

Considerations for your next employee Engagement Survey

So, now you know the pros and cons of employee engagement surveys, you can start to think about how you’ll conduct your next staff survey.

Remember what the purpose of an engagement survey is for. Obtaining employee feedback and opinions to help grow your business.

Whatever your business does, it’s likely not to be unique. Most people can copy your product and service if they want to. What makes your business unique is your people - because your current or future competitors don’t have your people. So harness the enthusiasm of your people to help your business grow.

With that in mind - it’s important to be prepared to receive feedback - good and bad. Prepare yourselves by talking about the fact that you may not have a true understanding of how your employees feel about working for your company. Be prepared for surprises.

Your idea of what’s important to your staff may vary from what is actually important to them.

Here are some quick pointers to remember:

Define a purpose and goal for your survey before you write a single question
Align your questions with the objectives you have set
Do not sway answers by asking leading questions
Asking the right questions is a skill. Take the time to ask good questions
Make sure your colleagues will understand each question
Clearly outline to colleagues why you’re carrying out this survey
Keep it totally anonymous - working with a third party ensures this and gives colleagues confidence
Promote the survey to encourage a good response
Set time aside to review answers and analyse results
A third-party employee engagement survey expert will help you ask the best questions and will analyse data correctly, providing valuable insights
Communicate with your staff after the survey, sharing the key insights - good and bad. It has to feel like a true reflection of what they’ve said.
Take action. There’s no point wasting time and money running a survey if you don’t do anything with the results!

Your survey results will give you valuable insight. Just as valuable as the insight you get from customer research. Both help you to grow your business.

Need help with assessing your employee engagement levels?

Let us help you become a powerful communicator and a champion of your people. With decades of experience in strengthening employee engagement, Enthuse can help you plan a meaningful employee engagement survey that provides useful insights to your team. We can then add real value by working with you to take action on the survey insights, building an employee engagement strategy and plan.

Discover more by contacting us today. Call Andrea on 07812343310 or email hello@enthuse-comms.co.uk.

Advantages and disadvantages of employee engagement surveys