Employee Engagement Survey Questions, Tips, and Template [Updated for 2023]

Ensuring your employees are happy is a critical part of business success. That’s why employee engagement surveys are an essential tool. We’ve created a customizable employee engagement survey template you can use today to get honest and actionable insights from your team.

Updated: November 15, 2023  

The term “employee engagement” is formally defined as the extent to which employees feel passionate about their jobs, are committed to your organization, and put effort into their work. 

In a professional landscape where human capital is arguably the most valuable business asset available, having engaged employees is a key to success. In fact, Gallup found that engaged teams show 21% greater profitability, and a report from The Engagement Institute indicated disengaged employees cost U.S. companies more than half a trillion dollars every year.

But how can you really be sure exactly how engaged your staff are? It’s not unthinkable that employees would hesitate to tell their leaders they were disengaged for fear of repercussions. 

Enter: the anonymous employee engagement survey.

When done correctly, these can be an extremely effective and accurate temperature check of where your team is at.

Why Are Employee Engagement Surveys So Crucial in 2023?

Employee engagement surveys are more important in 2023 than they’ve ever been before. They play a vital role in enhancing organizational performance and employee well-being and serve as a critical tool for gauging the morale, satisfaction, and involvement of employees in their workplace.

This is especially true in an era where remote and hybrid work have become increasingly prevalent—and one where massive changes in the professional landscape have, in recent years, spawned phenomena like The Great Resignation and created massive changes in employee preferences.

You know the old adage: knowledge is power.

When handled correctly, employee engagement surveys offer profound insights into how your employees feel about their roles, management, and your company culture—equipping you with the power to make real and meaningful change for the better.

They provide a structured platform for employees to express their views, concerns, and suggestions, fostering a sense of being heard and valued. This feedback is vital for companies to adapt and evolve in a rapidly changing business environment, ensuring that they remain competitive and retain top talent.

When employee feedback is actioned, it can solve common business challenges including productivity, turnover, and company performance.

Tips for Using Anonymous Employee Engagement Surveys

Before you set out to deploy your employee engagement survey, there are some best practices you’ll want to abide by in order to ensure their success.

Decide on Survey Frequency

The frequency with which you conduct anonymous employee engagement surveys depends on what you’re hoping to get out of them. If it’s a one-time temperature check in hopes of identifying an isolated issue, then it would be wise to conduct one survey to identify an issue and then a follow-up survey to determine whether the issue has been resolved.

However, it’s most beneficial for organizations to conduct employee engagement surveys at least once per year, if not more frequently. At Outback Team Building & Training, we conduct our Annual Engagement Survey every November because it provides us with a year-over-year analysis. This allows us to pinpoint if and how things are changing and to help identify strategies we can implement to enhance engagement among our team. 

Develop Strategic Survey Questions

The theory behind anonymous employee engagement surveys is simple. However, executing them effectively is significantly more challenging. That’s because you need to ask the right questions in the right way in order to achieve honest, meaningful, and actionable feedback.

Your questions need to be impactful, exploratory, and categorized. But at the same time, your survey needs to be respectful of your team’s time. They have their day-to-day work to take care of, so they probably don’t have time to spend an hour on a survey. 

Instead, you’ll need to make sure your survey is user-friendly and concise. You should also utilize a combination of multiple-choice and open-ended questions to ensure you give people a chance to provide detailed thoughts. 

If the prospect of having to determine this finicky balance seems daunting enough to be deterring, don’t worry. We’ve created an Employee Engagement Survey Template in collaboration with our in-house experts so that you can simply share it with your team and get all the information you need.  

Click here to skip ahead to our survey template link and instructions.

Analyze the Results and Determine What Action to Take

The last and most important part of the anonymous employee engagement survey process is to analyze the results and take any necessary action. If you’re unsure how to do this, you can try:

• Organizing your survey results in a way that makes it easy to interpret and analyze the data so that you can draw conclusions like “perception of culture has increased by 5%” or “21% of our employees feel they don’t have a clear understanding of their job responsibilities.”
  
  
• Identifying trends, positives, or areas for opportunity using your newly acquired data
  
  
• If you have data from previous years, dig into the year-over-year results in order to understand what might be driving the level of engagement in your organization
  
  
• Connecting with your leadership team to determine how to address any issues
  
  
• If you’re comfortable doing so, share the results with your team, highlighting any strong points along with your action plan to remedy any red flags

Following an employee engagement survey, it’s often wise to engage in targeted team building, training and development, or coaching and consulting solutions with your team.

If the results are positive, this can help reinforce that momentum. And if you’re experiencing challenges, these solutions can help your team develop key skills and build a stronger rapport in a hands-on and impactful way.  

Downloading and Using Your Free Employee Engagement Survey Template

Outback Team Building & Training has created an anonymous employee engagement template that you can set-up and use within your organization in just a few minutes.

Follow these steps to create your own employee engagement survey: 

1. Sign-in to your Google account 
   
   
2. Access the survey template
   
   
3. At the top right of your screen, click on the three dots icon
   
   
4. Click “Make a Copy” and select a location to save your survey
   
   
5. When your new copy is saved, you can:
   
   
   • Rename your survey as you please
     
     
   • Click the three dots icon to…
     
     
     • Edit your preferences such as:
       
       
       • Making questions required
         
         
       • Collecting email addresses (we recommend not collecting email addresses in order to ensure confidentiality and help your team feel more comfortable in being honest) 
         
         
       • Add collaborators, such as other leaders, or make your survey and results private to yourself only
         
   • Under the “Preferences” menu, we recommend opting to “Limit to 1 Response.” This way, employees can only complete the survey once, in turn ensuring your data remains accurate. This will require them to sign in but will keep their email address anonymous. It’s wise to communicate this to your team in advance. 
     
     
6. When you’re ready to distribute your survey:
   
   
   • Click “Send” at the top right of your screen and you can…
     
     
     • Edit your message
       
       
     • Either email it directly through Google or copy and share the URL from your own email address
       
       
7. Once you’ve distributed your survey and your employees have responded, you can:
   
   
   • View responses by clicking the “Responses” tab at the top center of your screen
     
     
   • Export your results into a spreadsheet for easy analysis by clicking the green Excel emblem above your responses

The most important step in any employee engagement survey is taking action on the feedback. Not all feedback is realistic or reasonable, but do your best to communicate what actions you will take as a result of the feedback you received.

Learn More About Employee Engagement Solutions That Can Benefit Your Organization 

For more information about team building, training and development, and coaching and consulting solutions that can help drive employee engagement within your company, just reach out to our Employee Engagement Consultants.