7 Employee Engagement Surveys to Steal From

It’s cheaper to retain rather than replace employees — to the tune of 33% of a worker’s salary to hire a replacement after they depart.

The good news is that, according to a 2017 report from the Work Institute, 75% of the causes of employee turnover are preventable.

That’s where an employee survey comes in handy. An employee engagement survey is a tool that takes the temperature of how engaged your workers are, aka how committed and connected they are to their job and, how likely it is that they’re going to stick around rather than look for a new opportunity somewhere else.

Never heard of an employee engagement survey before? Maybe you’ve heard of it but have no idea where to start when it comes to crafting your own? Well, the good thing is that there is plenty to learn from all of the businesses that have come before yours. Employee engagement surveys have been around for years, which means there is plenty of inspiration to be had.

The good news is that, according to a 2017 report from the Work Institute, 75% of the causes of employee turnover are preventable. 

One approach is to take what works from what you find, ditch what doesn’t, and customize everything to the particular needs of your small business. Here are a few standout examples of employee engagement surveys that it wouldn’t hurt to emulate.

The employee engagement survey template from SurveyMonkey

What better place to start than a company that literally specializes in surveys? You have to sign up for an account to access it, but the best part is that it’s totally free to do so. The best thing about SurveyMonkey’s template is that it has been used over 110,000 times already, takes roughly 6 minutes for your employees to complete, and covers 42 questions.

You can preview how the survey looks on desktops, mobile phones, and tablets to make sure that it’s workable in whatever format your employees chose to take it. Many of the questions are laid out on a “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree” Likert scale, and it captures respondents’ roles as well as which department they work in so you can analyze trends as responses roll in.

Talentlyft’s employee engagement survey

This recruitment company has put together a variety of different approaches towards employee engagement surveys that are a great starting point. Talentlyft also offer a Likert scale option that focuses on employees’ attitudes toward everything from whether or not they collaborate with their team members to whether or not they have what they need to succeed, but also offer examples of open questions and questions on a scale of 1 to 10.

The open questions cover topics like whether or not an employee feels motivated to be successful or help the company achieve its goals, and which company operations, if any, the employee would like to be more involved in.

The 1 to 10 questions cover employee engagement elements like “How well do you feel you understand the company’s mission, vision, and values?” and “What is the extent to which you feel like your ideas and suggestions are listened to and considered?”

Qualtrics’ employee engagement software

If you’d like to skip creating your own employee engagement survey altogether, there’s Qualtrics, which lets you monitor employee engagement in real-time.

The platform boasts companies like Under Armour and JetBlue among their customers and is a solid option for anyone who feels a little too overwhelmed to create an employee engagement survey from scratch.

Once you’ve gotten some experience with them and have a sense of how they work, it’s always something you can decide to bring in house down the line.

Typeform’s employee engagement survey template

The best thing about Typeform’s template is that you can either sign up and customize their template or you can simply pursue their employee engagement survey page to see exactly which questions are asked in the survey.

The questions also come with advice on the way that the answers are captured. There are open-ended questions like “What does the company do to boost morale and promote a great work environment?” (the answers you get will show you what to double down on).

There are also questions that use a Likert scale like “I am paid well for the work that I do.”

Officevibe’s engagement survey template

Nestled part way down their page on the topic is a list of 19 employee engagement survey questions that offer a very basic rubric to build on.

While what they offer is far from complete, if you’re looking to understand what a super paired down employee engagement survey looks like, this is it. Hey, not everyone is ready to jump in with a full-blown survey but doing 1, even if it’s just asking 19 questions, is significantly better than doing nothing.

Pingboard’s employee engagement template

The cool thing about Pingboard’s template is that they list a rationale for each question that has and make creating your own copy of their survey as easy as the click of a mouse.

Their survey focuses on questions about the company’s strategy and goals, managers, leadership, and opportunities for growth and advancement. It’s offered in a Google Survey form, but the questions and methods for capturing answers are also provided in regular old text that you can copy and paste if Google isn’t for you (not everyone needs their work to live on the cloud!).

The 10 question survey is administered with a Likert scale where 1 correlates to “none/never/not at all” and 5 means “a lot/all the time/extremely” depending on the form of the question.