The 4 Key Benefits of Employee Engagement Surveys

In today’s fast-paced, tech-driven world, it’s critical for businesses to do everything within their power to keep their employees engaged. Quite simply, engaged employees are happier, they’re more productive, and they’re less likely to look for a job at another organization.

Despite that notion, results from Deloitte’s 2015 Global Human Capital Trends survey found that:

87% of organizations say employee engagement is one of their top challenges.

To this end, many organizations have adopted annual employee engagement surveys. As the name suggests, these surveys are given to employees once a year and are intended to gauge the state of engagement across an entire company.

Does Annual Make Sense?

But if the goal is to create an engaged workforce, does it really make sense to check in with your employees only once a year?  

Probably not, if for no other reason than attitudes change over time or you might catch one of your workers on an exceptionally good or bad day — variables that could certainly skew results. For these reasons, it comes as no surprise that many businesses are rethinking the way they do engagement surveys.

They’re adopting pulse surveys instead, which are given on a periodic basis (e.g., biweekly or weekly) and are designed to assess the health of an organization with respect to its culture, productivity, and engagement at a specific moment in time.

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Why Pulse Surveys?

SOURCE: giphy.com

1. Provide immediate insight

When a company conducts engagement surveys on an annual basis, it only collects data once every 12 months. So there might be huge problem brewing for nine months, for example, and management might not find out until surveys are issued once more.

Pulse surveys, on the other hand, are given more frequently. They provide immediate data the managers can use to improve specific areas of operations.

2. Help increase employee engagement

With pulse surveys, employees are asked to provide their honest feedback as to how things are going. In theory, management then takes the data gleaned from the surveys and enacts change. What better way is there for employees to feel as though their voice actually matters at their organization? Pulse surveys increase employee engagement because they provide workers with a platform to voice their opinions.

3. Allow organizations to chart their progress (or lack thereof)

With the results from previous pulse surveys on hand, managers are able to easily see whether they’ve made positive progress on any issues that were revealed in the past. At the same time, they can quickly identify areas where they might have dropped the ball a bit — and correct their lack of action.

4. Improve company culture for the better

Because they are all involved in the process, employees are more engaged as a result of pulse surveys. This, in turn, translates into a more enjoyable, more positive organizational culture. Thanks to pulse surveys, your employees will love coming to work every day — and they won’t even think about finding another job anytime soon, if for no other reason than they’ll enjoy being part of a company that cares about its staff.

The benefits of pulse surveys speak for themselves. Is it time for your organization to rethink how your employee engagement surveys are done?

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