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If you are assessing the level of engagement or job satisfaction of your employees, you are probably interested in knowing exactly what matters most to them. This information is critical to understanding exactly what you need to fix. To simply measure what employees are most and least satisfied with is not enough. You might find that your employees are quite dissatisfied with some aspect of their jobs, but that the thing they are unhappy with is not really that important to them or has little bearing on how engaged they are. Or you might find that your employees are moderately satisfied with some other aspect of their jobs, but you also learn that this is the most important thing to them and therefore an area to focus on improving.
Some organizations are tempted to include a set of items that asks people to rate the "importance"
of the things they are being asked, but the problem with doing this is that
it can double the length of your survey and thereby reduce the response rate.
An employee survey with a low response rate calls into question the validity
of the assessment.
With some simple statistical methods, you can conduct an effective employee engagement survey that measures importance without asking employees to rate the importance of every item. Conduct a simple statistical analysis of the results in which you correlate responses to each "satisfaction" or "engagement" survey item with an overall level of satisfaction/engagement. This would work as follows...
Suppose you have an opinion survey that measures 25 aspects of employee satisfaction
and you want to know which are the most important to your employees. For the final question
in the survey, ask a general question about their overall level of job satisfaction.
Additionally, if your survey includes distinct areas of content, you might ask
about the overall satisfaction in each of those areas.
Then, once you have gathered all the data, use our Correlation Engine to look at the correlations between each item in the survey and the overall level of satisfaction. Items with the highest correlations are the ones that are most important to your employees and items with a low correlation are relatively unimportant. With this information, you will be able to target your improvements in the areas where they will be the most effective.
One final note on correlating overall engagement or satisfaction with the items in your
survey: If your respondents come from distinct demographic groups and there
are enough respondents in these groups, calculate the correlations for each
key subgroup. You may find that these different respondent groups consider different
things most important. (You must define these groups as demographic questions when you create your employee attitude survey.)
Sample output from our Correlation Engine for an employee satisfaction survey.
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