Multiple companies globally have adopted a remote or hybrid work environment after the pandemic.
The hybrid workplace model allows employees to work from home, the office, or a mix of both. The flexible arrangement offers complete autonomy to employees looking for a work-life balance. Moreover, according to a Mckinsey survey, 58% of executives reported increased employee engagement post adopting hybrid workplace culture.
While such a trend is on the rise, ensuring increased employee productivity and engagement with this new way of working is crucial.
In a situation where face-to-face communication, team building, and fun are no longer possible, employers must connect effectively with their hybrid workforce. There must be a method to determine how your employees feel about their jobs and track their engagement levels.
Surveys remain one of the most valuable tools to help you understand the sentiment of your teams working in a hybrid environment.
Employee Engagement Surveys and the Software
Employee engagement is essential in a hybrid work environment because it helps maintain productivity, communication, job satisfaction, community involvement, and customer service.
Employee engagement surveys can provide a range of benefits for organisations, including identifying areas of improvement, increasing employee retention, boosting productivity, improving customer satisfaction, and informing strategic decision-making.
These surveys include a list of questions distributed amongst the employees to get different insights. The questions can range from relationships with their peers to their opinions about their managers and the workplace culture.
The idea behind asking in-depth questions in a survey is to ensure that the employees feel that they are heard. In hybrid workplaces, direct feedback becomes challenging to gather and assess.
A better alternative is employee engagement survey software that helps design custom survey experiences, analyse your data in a snap, get support for any project, team, or organisation, and maximise the data’s potential.
Benefits of Employee Engagement Surveys
Identify knowledge silo
Knowledge silos are informational gaps between teams or employees that impede the organisation’s growth as a whole.
An employee engagement survey can be targeted specifically to fill these gaps with questions like:
- Which part of the team do you feel you’re less connected to?
- What skillset would you like to learn from your peers to improve your work?
- Do you understand your role in contributing to a specific task?
- Are you capable of carrying out the required tasks?
Identifying the gaps, a lack of comprehension, or an untapped skill early allows you to address it with training, mentoring, or one-on-one meetings and avoid bigger mistakes.
Improved collaboration
Employees feel much more motivated in an environment that fosters creativity. In an office environment, such changes can be directly applied or expected out of employees, but it can be strenuous in a hybrid workplace model.
Employees feel important when their creative input is valued and integrated into the business operations. Employment engagement surveys can motivate people to be more creative and collaborative with their answers once they feel like their insights are taken into consideration.
Employee engagement surveys can prompt teams from different departments to come together and work jointly to create a more conducive environment.
Increased accountability
Since increased employee engagement is directly correlated to higher profitability, it is not just the responsibility of the employees to contribute insights but also of the HR department and the executive leaders to ensure the applicability of those ideas.
Employee engagement surveys give senior executives a scope to figure out areas of improvement and consequently improve them with the help of those insights.
Failure to not recognise the gaps and having blindspots in the organisation can help map the key people who can be held responsible for those gaps. However, such gaps can also incentivise senior executives to stand out by offering actionable insights.
Workplace safety
For most employees, engagement is crucial to stay connected with the overall environment of the organisation. Furthermore, it helps them be in the loop of all the preventive measures or safety policies that the organisation has in place.
Through employee engagement surveys, employers can gauge whether employees know specific policies. For example, “Have you read through the Prevention of Sexual Harassment (PoSH) policy our organisation has in place?”
With the help of such questions, awareness can be raised based on the answers received. Leaders can develop awareness initiatives, workshops, and seminars to educate their employees.
Improved mental wellbeing
The flexibility offered by a hybrid workspace is a bonus in terms of improving employees’ mental health.
The freedom to work from anywhere allows employees to create their own pace of work, step away from workstations when needed, and recharge themselves mentally. This arrangement reduces one of the rising issues in the traditional corporate space, i.e, burnout.
An employee engagement survey can help employers understand these issues more intricately, so they can understand their employees’ workload and how they are managing it. With the help of this information, employers can ensure that their policies and schedules are in accordance with the way their employees are working.
Moreover, they can also ensure that the employees have all the necessary tools and resources at their disposal to manage their workload effectively and healthily.
Create an inclusive culture and maintain high retention
Building a culture of inclusion and belonging in a hybrid work environment can be more difficult. Employee engagement surveys can assist organisations in determining whether their employees feel valued, recognised, and appreciated. One of the top reasons for employees to leave is a lack of recognition.
How Can Employee Engagement Survey Software Help?
Although there are numerous advantages to having an engaged workforce, businesses frequently fail to prioritise surveys due to the presumed amount of extra time and labour it entails. But this does not have to be the case with employee survey tools available today.
There are multiple tools in the market that allow their users to generate customised surveys that can be tracked, analysed, and presented in different forms like pie charts, percentage bars, and even tree maps.
The most significant advantage of using employee engagement software is that it is built based on multiple customer insights.
These tools are specially designed for the complete customisation of your surveys by including logos, brand colours, and mobile-friendly features that ease down the survey process. In addition, the survey reports and analytics are generated in real-time.
One such tool is C-ASK, a cloud-based survey platform that helps you build highly customised surveys with features like team evaluations, changing trends, and, most importantly, keyword rating.
C-ASK is an online survey and quiz platform that captures feedback surveys across every user interaction, providing endless survey creation options. This includes multimedia questions, multilingual surveys, multiple responses, exciting themes, and mobile-ready surveys, to name a few.
The app allows you to share surveys with your users via email, social media, and embedded links. In addition, it displays all your survey data in an easy-to-navigate and tidy dashboard.
C-ASK also lets you analyse text and most commonly used phrases to research and categorise responses and the overall tone of answers. The tool tracks change in responses over time to identify any trends.
Multilingual support staff, 24/7 email and phone support, and a dedicated account manager enable seamless use of the software.
Implementing Employee Engagement Surveys in a Hybrid Workplace
Employee engagement surveys are modern management tools that must be carefully planned and organised, especially in a hybrid work environment.
Consider the following steps when planning a survey:
- Determine the objective.
- Examine previous survey results and employees’ willingness to participate in an engagement survey.
- Make a list of essential topics for the questionnaire based on the survey purpose and intended audience. Make sure that no question has a negative impact on co-worker relationships.
- Ensure that your employees understand the significance of the survey and convey to them that their involvement is required.
- Inform them about the survey and offer a smooth survey experience because effective communication raises awareness, enthusiasm for the survey, and trust in the survey process.
- After completing the survey, ensure the results are communicated to your employees. Give a brief presentation.
- Inform the hybrid workforce about your actions and progress. Make a clear connection between the survey analysis, the measures being taken, and the progress made.
- Conduct employee surveys regularly.
Tips on Asking the Right Hybrid Workplace Survey Questions
The questions on your employee engagement survey should help determine whether respondents perceive that your organisation values its employees and will do everything possible to ensure their well-being.
- Inquire about their job satisfaction in terms of working in a hybrid mode every day, their satisfaction with the team, and their compensation.
- Even though they are experiencing a change, probably disruption, in their work and home environments, ask them about effective collaboration with co-workers.
- Your survey questions should assess whether your employees are aware of and have access to the tools, information, and people that can assist them in navigating the changed work environment.
- Inquire about appreciation and motivation at work and if they get recognition for their accomplishments. Also, ask if the company’s culture fosters a comfortable and supportive environment, especially in a hybrid mode when personal interaction is reduced.
- Ask about their thoughts on the possibilities available to them for professional development, to utilise their skills in this role, and their familiarity with the tools that can maximise their potential in this position.
- A few open-ended questions customised to your organisation in each survey are always a good idea. In response to open-ended questions, employees can share their thoughts in their own words. Ask them what practices they want altered to help them become more engaged at work.
Final Thoughts
With clear communication and the implementation of purposeful employee feedback, businesses can continue to refine and improve their hybrid workplace, leading to greater employee happiness and satisfaction. There are several reasons why conducting surveys can benefit HR professionals, business leaders, and team leaders.
- Surveys can assist in measuring employee engagement and satisfaction. This data can be used to identify improvement areas and develop strategies for boosting employee morale and retention.
- Feedback on policies and procedures, such as employee benefits, performance evaluations, and training programs, can be gathered via surveys.
- Additionally, surveys can identify areas where employees may require additional training or development.
- Using surveys, you can monitor the organisational culture and identify areas for improvement. This data can be utilised to develop strategies for enhancing communication, collaboration, and teamwork strategies.
