Employee Engagement Survey Examples to Inspire Your Survey Strategy

Employee engagement surveys are a vital tool for understanding how connected, motivated, and satisfied your workforce is.

We gathered a set of employee engagement surveys from multiple organizations (think Cisco, Gitlab) to inspire you. You will learn how they approach:

• Asking open-ended or rating questions
• The different categories of questions (targeting various drivers of employee engagement) that you should include in your surveys
• The length of the survey and frequency of sending them out to employees

Example 1: Cisco’s “Engagement Pulse”

After years of research, Cisco identified the eight critical questions corresponding to four areas of engagement:

• Purpose
• Excellence
• Support
• The future

Plus, the 1-5 Likert scale questions can be further bundled in “We” and “Me”-focused categories:

• The “We” items measure communal aspects of the workplace, so they ask about the team and Cisco
• The “Me” items measure aspects of the workplace that are individual. They ask about an individual’s relationship with the work they do and the relationship with their leader

There is a comments field for team members to share additional feedback with the team leader.

It is also interesting to note that for Cisco, measuring engagement is strategic for their approach to performance management:

Managers send the pulse survey quarterly. Once the results come in, teams discuss them together. The goal is to celebrate current engagement and discuss continued engagement. Managers are also encouraged to continue the engagement conversation during 1-on-1s, primarily to accommodate team members who may be more candid in a more private setting.

Example 2: GitLab Team Member Engagement Survey (November 2020)

GitLab’s Team Member Engagement Survey contained 46 multiple-choice questions, including three free text questions.

The multiple-choice choice questions use the following scale:

1. Strongly disagree
2. Disagree
3. Neither agree nor disagree
4. Agree
5. Strongly agree

Questions are grouped by sections, which correspond to factors of engagement.

The survey is thorough, touching on various topics influencing employee engagement–from perceptions of leadership and team dynamics to personal development and company culture.

The comments section allows employees to provide qualitative insights, giving a voice to potential concerns or praises that may not be captured in the fixed-response items.

We particularly like the ‘Action’ section. It helps understand the credibility and trust employees place in the feedback process, indicating if they believe their feedback will lead to tangible change.

This engagement survey example is the longest included in our review. The survey might be too extensive, with many sections and questions to potential survey fatigue. This can affect the quality of responses as employees may rush through questions.

Example 3: Employee engagement survey from the Office of Financial Management, State of Washington

The Employee Engagement Survey from the Office of Financial Management, State of Washington, measures employee satisfaction with several components of the work environment, or “conditions of engagement”:

• My work questions
• My team questions
• My customers questions
• My supervisor questions
• My agency questions
• My work environment questions

The survey contains three main types of questions:

• 22 standard questions
• 2 modern work environment supplemental questions
• 5 demographic questions

For the standard questions, employees have to answer how often the given statement is true. They use a 1-5 Likert scale:

1. Never or almost never
2. Seldom
3. Occasionally
4. Usually
5. Almost always or always

For the modern work environment supplemental questions, the following scale applies:

1. Very dissatisfied
2. Dissatisfied
3. Neutral
4. Satisfied
5. Very satisfied
6. N/A – Doesn’t apply to my position

At the end of the survey, they include the following open-ended demographic questions:

We can distill the conditions of engagement from their engagement survey into four overarching themes:

1. Clarity and alignment: This theme highlights the importance of understanding one’s role, how individual efforts contribute to organizational goals, and what’s expected at work
2. Support and resources: This theme highlights the importance of having the necessary tools, information, and training to do one’s job effectively, as well as a supportive and respectful relationship with supervisors
3. Recognition and growth: This relates to employees feeling valued, recognized for their contributions, and having opportunities for personal and professional development
4. Collaboration and culture: This theme underscores the significance of a positive work environment characterized by teamwork, cooperation, continuous improvement, inclusivity, and fairness

Example 4: Engagement Survey from Joyous' The Employee Experience Genome Project

The Engagement Survey from The Employee Experience Genome Project contains 25 questions: one for eNPS and 24 questions, six for each of the following realms:

• Culture and environment
• Fairness and inclusion
• Well-being
• Engagement

The Employee Experience Genome project breaks employee experience into three realms that group the experiences that most impact an employee’s engagement:

• Culture and environment questions focus on the resources people need to do their jobs well—sub-realms: clarity, responsibility, physical environment

“If you get culture and environment right, you will empower your teams. Get it wrong, and you will limit them.”

• Fairness and inclusion questions focus on the extent to which people think procedures, rewards, and interactions at work are unbiased and how valued people feel based on how others treat them—sub-realms: belonging, opportunity, fairness

• Well-being questions focus on the psychological functioning of people in the workplace—sub-realms: support, security, workload

Joyous shares the following recommendations for running the survey:

• You can send the complete 25 questions twice per year for baseline surveys.
• To collect continuous employee feedback, they recommend sending one question per week (one question from each realm per month). The goal is to get a general sense of how employees feel about the realms. Since every realm has three sub-realms, each with two questions, ask them 12 weeks apart so that you can track changes over time.

Example 5: The Utrecht Work & Well-being Survey (UWES)

The Utrecht Work & Well-being Survey (UWES) is a self-report questionnaire that measures work engagement.

The survey covers multiple facets of work engagement, providing a holistic view of an employee’s connection to their job.

The UWES contains questions grouped into three main categories:

1. Vigor: This dimension pertains to high energy and mental resilience while working, the willingness to invest effort in one’s work, and persistence even in the face of difficulties.
2. Dedication: This refers to being intensely involved in one’s work and experiencing a sense of significance, enthusiasm, pride, inspiration, and challenge.
3. Absorption: This is characterized by being fully concentrated and engrossed in one’s work, such that time passes quickly and one has difficulty detaching from work tasks.

Each category provides insights into different facets of work engagement, and together, they give a comprehensive picture of an employee’s level of engagement with their job.

There are 17 statements to be rated on a 1-6 scale with the following labels:

• 0 - Never
• 1 - Almost never / A few times a year or less
• 2 - Rarely / Once a month or less
• 3 - Sometimes / A few times a month
• 4 - Often / Once a week
• 5 - Very often / A few times a week
• 6 - Always - Every day

UWES is grounded in academic research, making its findings credible and reliable for organizational use.

Automate engagement surveys and boost motivation with Deel Engage

Well-crafted employee engagement surveys are essential tools for any organization aiming to enhance employee satisfaction, morale, and productivity.

However, the most critical step for a successful surveying strategy is to take action according to your findings and communicate with your employees. Deel Engage ’s specialized tools will help you achieve this:

• Set up recurring engagement surveys with open-ended or rating questions
• Decide if you should collect feedback anonymously or not
• Define the target audience of your survey according to specific group belonging (team, department, location), hire date, or more
• Send reminders to employees via email or your internal communication tool
• Use the Slack plug-in to collect data where your employees spend a lot of time
• Use feedback analytics to understand the most pressing issues shared by your employees
• Address learning and development concerns with the career management and training modules of the tool
• Deel HR, our truly global HRIS solution, is always included for free

‍Automate your survey processes with Deel Engage and unlock powerful analytics today.