Creating an

Employee
Engagement
Survey: The
questions to ask
and how to ask
them
Table of Contents

03-14 Introduction

05-12 The questions you should ask in your employee

engagement survey

13-18 How to ask your engagement survey questions

effectively

19-21 The importance of consistency, anonymity and

frequency

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01
Introduction
So you’re thinking about running an employee engagement survey? In that case, you
probably already understand the importance of employee engagement, and have set out
with two clear aims:

1. To accurately measure employee engagement levels in your organisation

2. To learn what’s impacting employee engagement so you can improve these areas of
your business

An employee engagement survey is the best place to start, however the quality of your
results will depend heavily on the questions that you ask, and how you ask them. With-
out a rigorous methodology, your results are less likely to be reliable, and therefore
harder to turn into meaningful action.

In this guide, we’ll draw on our expertise as an employee engagement platform provid-
er, and explain everything you need to know in order to design an effective employee
engagement survey. We’ll outline a reliable framework for measuring and understanding
engagement, while highlighting some common question-writing pitfalls that you’ll defi-
nitely want to avoid.

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02
The questions
you should ask in
your employee
engagement survey
Measuring employee engagement
using eNPS
When measuring something as important as employee engagement, it’s best to use an
established methodology. Fortunately, a simple and reliable metric already exists for
providing a snapshot of engagement in your organisation.

The Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) has been adopted by businesses around
the world such as Apple, Rackspace and Verizon, and is based on the concept of Net
Promoter Score® (NPS®).

Net Promoter Score® was developed in 2003 by Fred Reichheld and Bain & Co. in order
to measure customer satisfaction and loyalty. It works by asking the consumer a single
question on a 0-10 scale: “How likely is it that you would recommend [this product/
service] to a friend or colleague?”.

eNPS shifts the focus to employee engagement by asking:

“How likely are you to recommend [this organisation] as a good place to work?”

This wording encourages respondents to reflect on the various factors that influence
their workplace experience. As Reichheld explained in his article The One Number You
Need to Grow, by asking respondents to consider a recommendation, you also account
for cases in which a customer or employee will stick with a product or organisation due
to a lack of options, or inertia.

Ultimately, the NPS® methodology allows you to accurately measure customer advocacy
and commitment to a product or service. In terms of eNPS, this is employee engagement.

In recent years, the eNPS methodology has been expanded upon to give further insight
into the outcomes of employee engagement - loyalty, satisfaction and belief – by asking
three additional questions.

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Loyalty
If you were offered the same job at another organisation, how likely is it you would stay
at [this organisation]?

Belief
How likely is it you would recommend [this organisation]’s products or services to
friends and family?

Satisfaction
Overall, how satisfied are you working at [this organisation]?

It is up to you whether you choose to use the eNPS outcome questions in your survey
alongside the main eNPS question. If you do, these responses must also be taken into
account when calculating your company’s employee engagement score.

Calculating your organisation’s engagement score

An employee engagement score is commonly calculated on one of two different scales.
The first is the -100 to 100 scale traditionally used with the NPS® methodology. The
second is the 0-10 scale used when you ask the eNPS questions.

The -100 to 100 NPS® scale is primarily implemented by businesses that are already
reporting other metrics – such as customer satisfaction – using the same methodology.
By keeping the scale consistent across multiple applications, it is easy to compare the
health of different organisational KPIs.

Other businesses find that a 0-10 scale is more intuitive and better suited to their needs.
Both methods are equally valid, and there’s no reason why you can’t use a combination of
the two in your organisation, each for different purposes or with different stakeholders.

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How to use the NPS® scale
The first step in calculating your engagement score on the NPS® scale is to divide the
responses from all your eNPS questions into three categories:

Promoters: score 9-10

These are the respondents who gave the highest scores. They are considered to be
highly engaged and are loyal advocates of your organisation.

Passives: score 7-8

While these employees don’t feel overly negative about their workplace experience, they
aren’t especially engaged either.

Detractors: score 0-6

These are the people who gave the lowest scores to your eNPS questions. These
employees are actively disengaged.

Once you have your three buckets of responses, the next step is to calculate the
percentage of overall responses within each of them. An example could be:

Promoters (52%), Passives (28%), Detractors (20%)

Finally, you calculate your organisation’s engagement score by subtracting the

percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters. In this case it would be
52-20 = 32.

The NPS® scale ranges from 100 (a perfect score with 100% Promoters) to -100 (a score
with 100% Detractors). Anything above 0 is considered to be good, above 25 is very
good, and above 50 is exceptional.

How to use a 0-10 scale

While the NPS® scale may be a little complex in its construction, calculating your

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organisation’s employee engagement score on a 0-10 scale couldn’t be simpler.

By using the eNPS question framework, you’ve already invited responses to your
questions on a scale of 0-10. The next step is to find the average (mean). To do this, you
simply sum all your responses together, and divide by the total number of responses given.

Understanding the factors that

influence employee engagement
Using eNPS will provide a reliable snapshot of employee engagement levels in your
organisation. However, in order to act on these findings and improve your future score,
you need to understand what’s affecting engagement in your company. That’s why it’s
important to ask additional questions.

Your aim here is to ask about each aspect of an employee’s workplace experience
so that you can build a picture of what’s “driving” engagement in your business. For
example, employee workload, your office environment, or the level of manager support
that your employees are receiving, will all influence how engaged your people feel.

Once you’ve gathered this information, you will be able to analyse your results and
identify the root causes of disengagement among your teams – as well as areas in which
your business is performing well.

Why you should avoid asking overly-specific questions

When it comes to identifying the causes of engagement and disengagement, many
businesses make a common mistake; the biggest temptation is to ask focused questions
that are specific to issues or circumstances that you might already know about.

You may believe that this will give you a headstart in honing into problem areas, but in
reality overly-specific, targeted questions are bad for two reasons:

09
1. If you look for a problem, you will find a problem – even if it doesn’t exist.

Questions about specific events or circumstances can be “leading” in that they elicit
a response from people even if they had no strong feelings about the issue, nor any
inclination to raise them in the first place.

For example, you may feel that a recent merger or acquisition may be influencing
engagement and morale so you ask the question “How smoothly do you think
management handled our recent merger?”

This merger may have been a terribly run process and employee responses may
reflect that. However, there is not necessarily any proof that the merger process
itself had a negative impact on employee engagement levels.

In fact, it is the biased assumption of the person asking the question – who feels
that the merger was a cause of disengagement and therefore wants to measure it –
that leads to the link between engagement and the merger being drawn.

2. Specific questions aren’t benchmarkable

The other downside to overly-engineered questions is that they cannot be

benchmarked, neither internally nor externally.

In the case of external benchmarking, the issue is obvious. An employee

engagement survey in which all the questions are focused on the circumstances of
your organisation won’t give you the opportunity to compare your performance to
your industry peers.

For example, if your survey consists of questions such as “How do you feel
about our latest management training sessions?” or “How do you feel about our
performance in this year’s industry awards?” you will struggle to find any external
data to compare your results to. This will leave you unable to tell whether the
responses you receive are good or bad compared to an industry standard.

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 Internally, specific questions risk being more relevant to particular teams, offices or
employee groups than others. Asking a question about satisfaction with commision
will only be relevant to your sales teams, and won’t give you a reliable way to
compare how all your departments feel about pay. Likewise, a question about a
team-building retreat for your London employees might not be comparable to any
activities you’ve done with your teams in other offices.

Ultimately, if your aim is to understand how events, circumstances and organisational

changes are impacting employee engagement, it’s best to avoid asking questions about
these changes directly – this can lead to biased conclusions and a lack of benchmarking.

Instead, the best way to uncover the information you are after is to use a consistent
and universal framework, and to observe how your employees’ responses change in
accordance to these events and circumstances.

So how do you build a consistent and universal framework? The answer is to ask
employee engagement questions that are universally relevant to all employees –
regardless of industry, organisation, role, seniority or location.

How to use an engagement driver framework

Fortunately, employee engagement isn’t a mysterious, poorly-understood field – in fact,
there is a mountain of research into the subject from behavioural psychologists and
management theorists.

This research has helped to identify the fundamental psychological factors that impact human
motivation in the workplace. We refer to these as the “drivers” of employee engagement.

The methodology we use at Peakon uses 14 drivers based on these psychological

requirements. These are Accomplishment, Autonomy, Environment, Freedom of
Opinions, Goal-Setting, Growth, Manager Support, Meaningful Work, Organisational Fit,
Peer Relationships, Recognition, Reward, Strategy, and Workload.

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Let’s take Autonomy as an example. Research shows that when employees have
the freedom to decide how they approach a task, they are more engaged and more
motivated to complete it (Hackman & Oldham 1976, Ryan & Deci 1985). Therefore,
it’s important for you to include a question that enables you to measure the level of
autonomy your employees feel they have.

To measure Autonomy, we ask respondents to give a 0-10 score to the question:

“I feel like I am given enough freedom to decide how to do my work.”

We’ll discuss the wording of this question in more detail in the next section.

Basing your questions on research and proven psychological theories like this will help
you to understand what is really influencing employee engagement in your business.
Without a robust framework, it’s too easy for hunches and individual bias to influence
the type of questions that you ask, which leads to unreliable findings.

If you’d like to learn more about the 14 drivers of employee engagement, we’ve put
together a free 62-page ebook called The Psychology of Employee Engagement. This
will provide plenty of insight into the engagement drivers, and will help inspire your own
engagement driver questions.

However, we’re very proud of the work that our Organisational Development Science
team has done in creating our full set of engagement survey questions, and we truly
believe that it is the most robust engagement methodology available. By using the same
question library as hundreds of other organisations worldwide, you also give yourself
the ability to accurately benchmark your results against your peers. You can find all 46
Peakon engagement survey questions in the platform when you sign up for a free trial.

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03
How to ask your
engagement survey
questions effectively
We’ve established the importance of using a structured methodology to measure
engagement, and so it’s time to start thinking about how our questions should be
written to guarantee useful and reliable data.

Let’s look again at the Peakon Autonomy driver question from before:
“I feel like I am given enough freedom to decide how to do my work.”

The wording of this question, and the way it is presented in a survey, have both been
carefully considered. When it comes to writing your engagement questions, there are
three different things you need to keep in mind:

• Quantitative data: How do you ask a question so you receive good numerical data?
• Qualitative data: How do you ask a question so that you invite additional contextual
feedback?
• Question phrasing: How do you encourage considered responses, and avoid
compromising your results with bias and ambiguity?

In this section, we’ll examine each of these aspects and explain how to write your
engagement survey questions in an effective way.

Gathering quantitative data with

consistent scales
Quantitative data will form the bedrock of your survey analysis. It will give you an easy
way to compare engagement in teams, departments, or offices, so that you can identify
areas of the business that require improvement, or sources of best practice.

You’ll also want to compare engagement driver scores to each other so you are able to see
in which areas of the employee experience your company is performing well or poorly.

The easiest way to get this result is to use a clear and consistent numerical scale with
every question. We recommend a scale of 0-10.

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Some businesses may be used to asking questions on a Likert scale, which ranges from
1-5, or from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”. This, however, doesn’t give the same
level of granularity.

For example, small improvements in scores over time, such as a shift from a score of 6 to
a 7, will be shown on a 0-10 scale, but may not register on a 5-point Likert.

If you are already using the eNPS questions to measure engagement, it is important
that you continue to use the same 0-10 scale with all your engagement driver questions.
Switching between scales within one survey will confuse respondents and damage the
integrity of your data.

Getting additional context with

employee comments
Qualitative data can provide additional context to help you understand why your
engagement scores are changing.

Employee comments will often point to specific issues that you can address in order to
improve your overall engagement score. They can also provide an opportunity for you to
start an open discussion with employees around a particular topic. This might allow you
to allay concerns or provide updates on an issue that employees are consistently raising.

To achieve this, you should ensure that every question you ask has an optional comment
box for employees to leave additional feedback. It’s important to keep it optional so that
your team only raise issues that they feel strongly enough about to discuss voluntarily
– otherwise it can be hard to discern the significance of the issue, and you may end up
with more comments than you can handle.

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While it’s possible to introduce new policies and initiatives based on quantitative
engagement and driver scores alone, qualitative comments give you a more accurate
and efficient way to identify the exact causes of disengagement.

You might also consider asking open-ended questions, separate from your engagement
driver questions, which simply invite employee feedback and suggestions without
requiring a score.

For example, you could ask:

“If you had a magic wand, what’s the one thing you would change about [your
organisation]?”

This provides the opportunity for employees to be a little more imaginative, but also to
offer detailed, practical information that you can act on immediately.

Question writing tips to avoid

biased results
The phrasing of your questions is an essential part of designing an employee engagement
survey. If your questions are confusing or guide employees towards giving a particular
answer, it can skew your results dramatically. When they’re phrased correctly, your data
will more objective and actionable – and it will increase the chance of your employees
responding. All this can be achieved by following some very simple rules.

Use clear, unambiguous language

Using too many technical terms in your questions might confuse your employees, which can
lower response rates and result in inaccurate answers based on a poor understanding of the
question. Awareness of technical terms, acronyms and internal language can vary across an
organisation, so make sure to keep your questions as straightforward as possible.

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 Don’t: Do:
I understand how my OKRs support I understand how my work supports
the Strategic Alignments the goals of my team and department.

Only ask one question at a time

Trying to gather data on different aspects of engagement in one question can lead to
muddied responses. For example, “my manager gives me meaningful tasks and always
rewards good performance” covers three drivers (Meaningful Work, Recognition, and
Reward). A better approach would be to keep these as separate questions.

Don’t: Do:
My manager gives me meaningful The work I do is meaningful to me
tasks and always rewards good
performance

Avoid leading questions

Positive or negative language can subconsciously guide your employee towards giving
a specific answer. For example, “I see a path for me to advance my career in our fast-
growing organisation.” is biased and fast-growth might imply many development
opportunities. Biased questions like this may serve to corroborate hypotheses, but the
data won’t necessarily reflect reality.

Don’t: Do:
I see a path for me to advance I see a path for me to advance my
my career in our fast-growing career in our organisation.
organisation.

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Use the first person and reference behaviours
First-person phrasing encourages reflection by helping the employee to recall real-world
examples of their workplace experience. For example: “I can count on my co-workers
to help out when needed” encourages them to reflect upon their peer relationships and
give a full, considered response.

Don’t: Do:
“There are reliable and helpful “I can count on my co-workers to help
co-workers within the organisation” out when needed”

Avoid mandatory questions

Finally, always include an option to skip a question. This will help to keep your data
clean, as those who don’t understand a question, or for whom it doesn’t apply, won’t
be forced to give a random answer. If the same question is skipped repeatedly, this
could be a sign of ambiguous phrasing, poor internal communication, or a deeper
organisational issue. You may want to provide employees with ways to indicate why they
chose to skip a question to help you understand further.

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04
The importance
of consistency,
anonymity and
frequency
When you use a robust, theory-based framework to create an employee engagement
survey, you end up with reliable results that make it easy for you to benchmark, and for
real action to be taken.

However, there are three caveats to the advice we have given so far: If you want to
guarantee accuracy in your results, and if you are serious about improving employee en-
gagement in the long term, you must be consistent with your questions, ensure employ-
ee anonymity in your surveys, and also run them frequently.

Without consistency, you can’t

measure change
The issue is simple: If you choose to edit and update your engagement survey questions
often, it makes it impossible for you to measure how your employee engagement and
engagement driver scores have changed over time.

Even minor question changes, such as swapping out a word for a synonym, can cause a
variation in how people answer.

It’s important to resist the temptation to make edits, and remember that consistency is
key. It’s more valuable to observe the changes in engagement scores, than the actual
scores themselves.

A score of 8.2/10, for example, does not tell you as much as observing an increase from
7.7/10 to 8.2/10 over a six month period. This would show you that your engagement ini-
tiatives are working and help you to prove a return on investment. This is only accurate
when your engagement questions remain consistent.

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Anonymity encourages honest
feedback and high response rates
Employees are naturally cautious when answering surveys, and understandably so. In
order to get the most useful feedback, you are relying on your team to be completely
honest and open about their feelings towards your organisation, leadership, their man-
agers and their peers. Not all of this feedback will be positive.

If employees feel unsafe providing honest answers, for fear of negative repercussions,
then they will hold back information – or worse – choose not to participate in the survey
at all.

If you want to achieve high response rates, with honest responses, then you must en-
sure and communicate to your team that your survey is 100% anonymous.

Regular surveys allow you to

continuously improve engagement
Finally, while many businesses are used to running employee engagement surveys and
initiatives annually, we would advise a much more frequent approach.

There are a handful of issues associated with an annual approach to employee engagement
– namely a lack of insight from your data, and an inability to iterate and adapt your initiatives.

When you conduct a single survey once a year, you receive a quick glimpse at the state
of engagement in your organisation. This glimpse has the tendency to be inaccurate,
since it only reflects a single point in time, and is not representative of engagement
over a broader timeframe. It also makes it very difficult to tell if engagement is currently
increasing or decreasing.

When you run an engagement survey more frequently, such as monthly or quarterly, you

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give yourself the ability to identify engagement trends. This is especially useful for un-
derstanding the performance of your initiatives, and allowing you to adapt them accord-
ingly. With an annual survey, you have to wait 12 months before you learn whether or not
any improvement to engagement was made.

Best of all is a weekly “pulse survey” schedule, in which a small subset of your survey
questions are sent to your team each week. While this may seem daunting to perform
manually, there are many employee engagement platforms, such as Peakon, that are
especially designed to make survey distribution, analysis and action-planning a walk in
the park.

About Peakon
Peakon is the leading employee engagement platform,
helping people in organisations around the world to reach
their full potential.
Our data-driven engagement methodology is trusted by hundreds of the world’s best
businesses, such as Capgemini, Verizon, Ernst & Young, and easyJet.

Through a continuous approach to employee feedback and real-time analysis, we pro-

vide the insights you need to improve employee engagement, build a strong company
culture, and drive better business performance.

Book a demo at https://peakon.com/book-a-demo/ to learn more.

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Peakon.com

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