What are Good Questions for an Employee Engagement Survey

When you work with CustomInsight, you’ll hear us talk a lot about psychometric testing, benchmarking, and actionable data.

All of these are essential to create “good” questions for an employee engagement survey. And, because there is a science to questions, this is often where in-house surveys or overly short surveys miss the mark.

What is psychometric testing?

Psychometric tests are used in business to help an organization measure competency, personality, behavior, and skills. They can be used with everything from recruitment and 360-degree feedback to employee engagement and team assessments.

Reliability and validity are the key principles of psychometric testing.

Reliability refers to the consistency of a measure. There are three types of reliability: over time, across items, and across different researchers. Validity is determined by how well a test assesses what it claims to measure. Our psychometric testing expert ensures that your organization receives scientifically reliable feedback.

What is benchmarking?

Benchmarking is the process of comparing and evaluating an organization’s practices, processes, products, services, or employee engagement levels against those of industry leaders and/or competitors as well as other organizations. The kinds of companies (industry, size, etc.) and geography (certainly there are differences in cultural norms) aren’t as important as you think when it comes to benchmarking. Benchmarking has to do with specific items themselves.

Benchmarking works a lot like a handicap in golf. Amateur golfers with different skill levels have different handicaps. When golfers play against one another, each person's final score is adjusted by his or her handicap. This allows players with different levels of proficiency to play against each other on somewhat equal terms.

Every item in an employee survey has its own natural "behavior". Some items tend to get higher scores, and some items tend to get lower scores. This can be due to the way the item is worded, or it can have to do with the topic that the item addresses, or both. Benchmarking eliminates these natural differences between items, thereby allowing you to compare scores across items. Benchmarking also tells you whether those scores are high or low.

Without benchmarking data, you simply get a number. This doesn’t give you the necessary context to understand how your organization compares to others.

What is actionable data?

It’s not enough to know what. Your organization needs to know why and how. Why are your employees feeling frustrated? How can you improve access to workplace resources? Why are your employees getting sick? How can the organization better support a balance between work and home? Without the right data, you’ll be left with more questions than answers.

Questions like these measure whether or not your employees are engaged and/or satisfied:

I am very satisfied with my job.
I am highly committed to this organization.
I would recommend this organization to friends and family.
I am proud to tell people that I work for this organization.

These are common questions that short surveys typically use. And they provide a good indication of whether or not your staff is satisfied. Yet, they don’t measure why. Without the why, you can’t get to the how, and won't be able to implement meaningful engagement strategies.

How many questions should be included in an employee engagement survey?

Super short surveys will give your organization an inkling of what’s happening without providing the necessary information to implement meaningful changes. Overly long surveys are simply exhausting, and your staff might experience rater fatigue.

After working with organizations for over 30 years, we’ve found that the most effective surveys have a sweet spot of between 30 - 50 rating questions.

Should you include custom questions on a survey?

You absolutely can, but we recommend not too many. Keep in mind that custom questions will not be statistically validated or have benchmark data. This can leave you more confused as to whether those items are negative or positive.