A Complete Guide to Employee Engagement Survey Analysis
Employee engagement surveys are only as valuable as the insights they reveal. Learn how to analyze the results effectively and turn them into actions that address key challenges and create a better workplace for your employees.
Conducting a thorough employee engagement survey analysis is essential for improving your organization’s employee experience and engagement and driving the business forward.
This article will explore why analyzing employee surveys is crucial and offer a step-by-step guide on how to analyze employee engagement survey results effectively to create positive change across your business.
Creating and distributing a survey requires valuable resources, which is why you must meticulously analyze, report on, and act upon data.
Contents
What is employee engagement and why is it important?
What is the goal of employee engagement survey analysis?
What are the challenges of analyzing employee surveys?
How to analyze employee engagement survey results
FAQ
What is employee engagement and why is it important?
Employee engagement refers to how happy, motivated, and satisfied an employee is at work. According to Gallup, engaged employees outperform unengaged employees by a staggering 147%, as engaged employees are likely to be more productive and committed to their work. This makes monitoring and improving employee engagement vital to any organization’s success.
What is the goal of employee engagement survey analysis?
An employee engagement survey is designed to measure employee engagement across an organization’s workforce. The results will provide valuable insights into how your employees feel, think, and behave at work across departments, branches, and roles.
An anonymous survey is the best way to get a realistic picture of how engaged your employees are. It’s likely to reveal opinions or attitudes they may be hesitant to share with managers and leaders for fear it may be used against them and affect their career progression.
Conducting a survey also helps your employees feel heard and understood, but this alone is not enough. According to TINYpulse, only 25% of employees believe their organization takes effective action based on the feedback they provide through surveys. This, in turn, can lead to increased disengagement, which has a knock-on effect on productivity and profits.
Analyzing the data you collect from employee feedback helps you notice patterns, challenges, and problems. This data is highly valuable, but only if you collect and analyze it effectively and take action. You can then find solutions to these problems and implement them across the organization.
What are the challenges of analyzing employee surveys?
Although there are many benefits to analyzing employee surveys, it’s important to be aware of certain challenges.
The first challenge is creating a survey with too many questions, which becomes overwhelming for the participants to complete. This can decrease the accuracy of the results, which can lead to you taking actions that don’t suit the organization.
The second challenge is when a survey has too many themes. This can make it hard to benchmark the data and lead to too many possible courses of action.
Learn how to analyze engagement metrics to drive change
Understanding employee engagement metrics is essential for HR professionals who want to improve organizational culture and retain talent. Employee engagement data reveals the strengths and areas for growth within your team.
In AIHR’s HR Metrics and Dashboarding Certificate Program, you’ll gain skills in survey design, data analysis, and visualization to transform feedback into actionable insights.
This online, self-paced Certificate Program also provides practical experience in using engagement data to identify patterns, communicate findings, and implement strategies that drive engagement and boost performance.
How to analyze employee engagement survey results
1. Start by designing your survey well
As mentioned above, if your survey has too many questions or an overly varied mix of question types, it can be difficult to draw conclusions from the results. In addition, sending out an employee engagement survey just once a year may not give you a clear picture of how your staff feels. Hence, sending shorter surveys more frequently is likely to be more effective.
Asking the right questions is key to collecting valuable, tangible data on employee perceptions you can act upon. According to Visier, four factors most consistently impact employee engagement: leadership, enablement, alignment, and development. Therefore, asking questions related to these factors could be an excellent place to begin designing your survey.
Here are some examples of effective survey questions:
- I feel inspired and motivated by the vision of the organization
- I have everything I need to perform well in my role
- I know what I need to do to be successful at work
- Do you get excited about going to work?
- Would you recommend working at this organization to your personal network?
- Do you enjoy working with your team?
- Are you happy with the compensation and benefits you currently receive?
Some are questions, while others are statements. But both can be effective as you can obtain responses based on a numerical scale (e.g., “On a scale of 1-5, how much do you agree or disagree with this statement?”). This is an example of a closed question as it has a finite number of potential answers. While open-ended employee engagement survey questions can also provide important insights, relying on them solely can produce an excessively large volume of data that’s far too difficult to analyze.
To help you with this, you can download our free employee engagement survey template, which makes it easy to organize and analyze both closed-ended and open-ended survey responses.
2. Set clear goals
Before creating your survey, it’s essential to have clear goals and focus areas in mind and ensure the questions you choose help you fulfill these goals.
Take time to consider what the purpose of the survey is:
- What do you want to learn?
- What results do you hope to collect?
- What is the ultimate driving force behind the survey?
- Why is this important to our organization and employees?
It’s also beneficial to look at past surveys and use these learnings to inform your next survey.
- What didn’t work last time?
- How can we do things more effectively this time?
- Are there any questions we included previously that we want to use again?
- Are there any questions we should eliminate?
Your HR team must also consider what the rest of the organization is measuring. Although you may be focused on metrics like turnover and time to hire, the business may be more concerned with sales, profits, and client satisfaction. Make sure you know what your organization’s core metrics are and why they matter.
3. Quantify the data
Numeric scores are a simpler way to express results and make it much easier to compare data. Numbers are tangible and leave no room for misinterpretation or grey areas. This is why it’s necessary to obtain numeric scores wherever possible.
When analyzing employee engagement survey results, present data as a numeric score or percentage. This enables people to see patterns and trends in the results with ease. 
4. Segment your data
Each of your employees will have a slightly different experience at work. This is why segmenting your data is a key part of employee engagement survey analysis. Tracking and comparing different employee groups and demographics will offer you deeper insight into each group’s unique challenges at work.
You can measure the performance of specific teams, understand why some perform better than others, and create a plan of action for the areas that matter most. This is particularly useful if time or budget constraints mean you must be more selective with your resources.
Bear this in mind when creating your survey, and include optional questions on age, gender, and team. You can also explain why you need this information and assure employees you’ll maintain their anonymity.
5. Identify patterns and trends
Next, look for and identify patterns and trends within your survey results. You can do this by looking at certain demographics, employee status, tenure, etc.
For example, are most of your senior staff relatively happy at work, but not your lower-level employees and trainees? Is there a difference in results between those paid a fixed monthly salary and those who receive hourly wages?
If most of your employees feel the same way about a particular issue, that’s a strong indication you need to investigate further and something needs to change. If a handful of employees are frustrated or requesting something, take into account factors such as their departments, roles, teams, compensation packages, and work arrangements to see if you can spot any meaningful patterns.
6. Complement quantitative data with qualitative data
While numbers are important, it’s equally crucial to collect qualitative responses to complement your quantitative data and ensure you don’t miss any major concerns. Qualitative data can capture an employee’s thoughts, motivations, and attitudes.
For example, if an employee is asked how happy they are at work and gives a score of 4 out of 5, this may suggest they are generally satisfied. However, they may not have given a score of 5 because they have a specific concern or criticism. It’s vital to find out what this concern is so you can resolve it.
You may want to consider organizing a series of employee focus groups or reaching out to individuals for deeper conversations. Certain survey software enables you to do this even when surveys are completed anonymously.
7. Connect employee engagement to business outcomes
It’s important to remember that analysis is different from producing static reports. Analysis centers on combining several different metrics and processes and displaying and sharing the data in various ways. This helps answer critical business questions. For example, do the frequently changing managers within a team affect employee engagement?
Many organizations have high employee engagement levels but still suffer from high turnover rates in key roles. This suggests that employee engagement may not be related to work or individual roles but rather generous compensation packages.
This is where data analysis becomes invaluable and can help you understand what your employee engagement survey results mean for the business. Combine and analyze your engagement data with other critical information from your HR management systems, as well as business data from your ERP system.
8. Benchmark your results
Benchmarking can help you better understand your results and how your organization is performing compared to your previous results and industry standards and pinpoint key areas for improvement. Essentially, HR benchmarking involves comparing one set of survey data with another that measures something similar.
There are three types of benchmarks you can use:
- National: Benchmarking your results against national results will help you understand where your organization sits compared to others in the same country.
- Industry: An industry benchmark helps you determine how your organization compares to others within your industry. Because it accounts for industry factors, industry benchmarking is generally more reliable than national benchmarking.
- Internal: The final option for benchmarking is an internal approach. This means comparing your most recent results to past results to understand how your organization has performed over time.
You can send out a monthly or quarterly survey to track employee engagement before and after you implement a new software system so you can see if it boosts engagement. This enables you to track your progress and continuously make small improvements.
Benchmarking also enables you to ask (and answer) questions like:
- How did we perform this quarter compared to last quarter? How has the level of engagement changed?
- How are other organizations performing with regard to employee engagement levels?
- Is our turnover rate high or low for our industry?
9. Visualize the results
Visualizing the data you collect in your analysis will help team managers and stakeholders process and understand it, reducing the risk of misinterpretation. It will also help them gain actionable insights and identify areas of improvement.
There are several ways you can visualize your employee survey results:
- Pie charts: These show different categories that combine to make a whole. For example, if the question “Do you feel like there are enough progression opportunities for you in the organization?” had a 1-5 rating scale, a pie chart can show the percentage of employees who selected each number.
- Bar graphs: A bar graph enables you to compare responses between groups or show how a trend has changed over time. You can use a bar graph to show the difference between results across different departments in your organization.
- Line charts: A line chart is the best way to compare two sets of data. For example, you can compare this year’s engagement results with last year’s using a line chart. It can be particularly effective when displaying small changes that are not as visible on a bar graph.
- Call-out graphics: If you want to highlight a particular fact or figure, creating a call-out graphic might be the best approach. This works well if the fact or figure is a surprise or staff members and key stakeholders are heavily invested in it.
10. Review results with managers and take action
The ultimate goal of conducting an employee engagement survey analysis is to determine what action you must take to improve engagement. Once you’ve sufficiently analyzed and digested the data, the final step is to report your findings to managers and create a plan of action.
Even if you’re unhappy with the results, reporting them and promoting transparency across the business is still important. Instead of playing the blame game, address why problems occur and focus on finding a solution. This is your opportunity to do something positive to benefit your employees and boost the organization’s overall performance.
Schedule a meeting with managers and ensure the agenda is clear. Emphasize the importance of being solution-focused, ask for their input on their teams, and present your proposed action plan.
You may also want to propose incorporating employee engagement metrics into managers’ performance reviews. This can incentivize managers to improve their own skills, help develop their team, and enhance communication with their employees.
A final note
Analyzing engagement surveys helps you determine where your organization currently excels and where it needs to improve to boost employee performance, motivation, and commitment. This rich data can help you notice patterns and themes, which you can use to create an actionable strategy that enables you to increase engagement and get closer to achieving your wider business goals.
FAQ
Employee engagement analysis is the process of reviewing and interpreting data from employee surveys to understand how engaged employees are at work. It involves identifying trends, patterns, and areas where employees may feel motivated or disengaged, and using that information to improve workplace satisfaction, productivity, and overall business performance. The goal is to create actionable insights to drive positive organizational changes.
Set goals for what you want to learn. Once you’ve collected the responses, quantify the data by assigning numerical scores and segment results by demographic groups for deeper insights. Identify patterns and trends, complement quantitative data with qualitative responses, and connect findings to business outcomes. Finally, benchmark the results against past surveys or industry standards, visualize the data for easier interpretation, and collaborate with managers to develop an action plan based on the analysis.
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