An employee satisfaction survey shows how satisfied your employees are with their work, their terms of employment and the organisation. That tells an organisation a lot. But if you want to know whether your people will still be working with energy tomorrow, and whether they will stay, satisfaction alone won't get you far enough. For that, you need to measure work engagement. In this article, you will read what a satisfaction survey does and doesn't show, and why more and more organisations are taking the step from satisfaction surveys to engagement surveys.
What is an employee satisfaction survey?
With an employee satisfaction survey, you map the expectations, wishes and experiences of your staff. You gain insight into what is going on in the workplace and where the points for improvement lie. A satisfaction survey consists of a series of questions, usually divided over a number of fixed themes, such as:
- communication;
- terms of employment;
- workload and working conditions;
- the organisation and its leadership;
- personal development.
For each topic, employees indicate how satisfied they are. The organisation can then make targeted improvements. Nothing wrong with that so far!
What a satisfaction survey does and doesn't show
A satisfaction survey gives you a snapshot of how employees rate their work and their employer. So it mainly looks back: how do you like your salary, how is communication going, are you satisfied with your manager? That is useful information, especially for tracking down bottlenecks.
But satisfaction says little about what someone will do tomorrow. An employee can be perfectly satisfied and still work on autopilot. Work and organisational psychologist Wilmar Schaufeli describes satisfaction as a sense of satiation: you are content, but it doesn't get you moving. Work engagement, on the other hand, is about activation. According to Schaufeli, that is also why work engagement is more strongly related to performance than satisfaction (Schaufeli, What is engagement?).
Gallup comes to the same conclusion. Only measuring satisfaction or happiness, and catering to employees' wishes, often doesn't deliver what ultimately matters: better results (Gallup).
In short:
- Satisfaction looks back. It tells you how employees value their current situation.
- Work engagement looks forward. It predicts how much energy, effort and initiative you can expect, and how likely someone is to stay.
From satisfaction survey to engagement survey
Engaged employees are bursting with energy, feel strongly dedicated to their work and are completely absorbed in it. Researchers call this vigor, dedication and absorption. Research around the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES) shows that work engagement goes together with more satisfaction, more commitment to the organisation and a lower intention to leave. Engaged employees also show more personal initiative and more proactive behaviour (UWES manual, in Dutch).
Gallup's large meta-analysis also shows why it pays to look beyond satisfaction. Compared with teams in the bottom quartile for engagement, teams in the top quartile had, among other things, 78% less absenteeism, 23% higher profitability and considerably lower turnover (Gallup Q12 meta-analysis).
That is why an engagement survey is the logical successor to the classic satisfaction survey. The Employee Engagement Survey by Leiders.nl is an example. It measures how much people enjoy their work and how engaged they are. You also see how they experience their manager and whether they speak proudly about their employer. That way you see not only how satisfied people are, but also what gives them energy, what role leadership plays in it and whether employees speak proudly about your organisation.
Want to know more about the difference between the two concepts? Then also read from satisfied to engaged.
How do you approach an employee survey?
Whether you measure satisfaction or work engagement, a few things determine whether the survey delivers anything.
- Ensure anonymity. An online questionnaire that employees fill in anonymously is by far the most common form. People then dare to be honest, and it is precisely that honest feedback that is most valuable. With an interview by a researcher, the question soon arises: "What if my negative answers end up with my manager?"
- Give people time. Schedule filling it in during working hours and explain why you are doing the survey. That increases the response.
- Use a validated questionnaire. Home-made questions are tempting, but then you can't be sure you are measuring what you want to measure. A scientifically grounded scale makes the results reliable and comparable.
- Look per team. Work engagement varies greatly by department and by manager. An average across the whole organisation hides where things are really going well, or badly.
The value lies in what you do with it
An employee survey is only valuable if something is actually done with the answers. Do you discover that employees experience less energy or engagement on certain points? Then get to work on it. Discuss the results with the teams, ask what they would change themselves and show that you value the feedback.
Only when the organisation does something with the feedback does the employee notice that his or her opinion matters. That way you not only make the organisation more transparent, but also make sure employees feel heard and understood. And that is enormously valuable, in every organisation!
Also read: job crafting to stay engaged
