Best tools for collecting & sharing employee engagement results

Data is powerful. For employers, data collected from your employees can tell a powerful story about how motivated and engaged your workforce is; how committed they are to their tasks, their teams, and to your company; and where there are any gaps that need to be quickly addressed. 

One area on which you should be focusing your attention is employee engagement. Decades of research has shown that when employees are engaged, organizations are in the best possible position for high performance. In fact, employee engagement is viewed as so crucial to firms’ ability to fulfil their goals and objectives that it is now the key concept that HR practitioners recommend that employers capture through employee surveys. Moreover, sharing employee engagement results with your workforce actually has the power to improve engagement even further, creating a win-win for both you and your employees. But what exactly is employee engagement, and how can you track it and share the results? In this article, we’ll explain the value of using surveys to measure employee engagement and share the results. We’ll also introduce you to some handy tools that integrate seamlessly with the SurveyMonkey platform to help you capture and share employee engagement data and drive business excellence.

But first: what exactly is employee engagement, and why should you measure it? Simply put, engagement is a psychological state that subsumes characteristics such as motivation, satisfaction, commitment, and enthusiasm. Engaged employees work hard physically and mentally, put thought into their work, enjoy their jobs, and exhibit high levels of wellbeing and satisfaction. 

There are actually three dimensions to employee engagement: a physical element, a cognitive dimension, and an emotional aspect.

These three characteristics of engagement are not independent of one another, but may in fact be interrelated: when an employee is personally engaged, they are physically involved in, cognitively vigilant of, and emotionally connected to their work. When an employee expends effort and energy in the fulfilment of their work (the physical dimension), they are more cognitively attuned to the work (the cognitive dimension) and they tend to develop a positive mindset towards the employer, their working conditions, and the organization (the emotional dimension).

This definition makes it obvious why it's crucial to measure employee engagement. When employees exhibit low levels of engagement, their performance—and your company’s—are likely to drop. Customers may be dissatisfied, KPIs might not be met, and absenteeism might increase: all factors that contribute to your bottom line. Measuring employee engagement is the first step in helping you to understand whether you have the human resources needed to meet your goals, and to identify where the gaps lie, so you can take swift, corrective action.

Gallup says it is possible to distinguish between three types of worker:

Using SurveyMonkey, you can measure engagement quickly, explore patterns in engagement across the organization, and gain actionable insight that will help you design processes and mechanisms to keep your employees engaged, and your organization on the up.

Now that we’ve discussed employee engagement and why it’s critical to measure it, we should discuss how to measure and monitor engagement in your organization. There are several tools for employee engagement measurement that we’ll discuss today.

Before you can begin to improve employee engagement, you have to know where you currently stand. An employee engagement survey, sent to your entire workforce, will give you a measurement of your current engagement levels. You’ll use the data you’ve collected to create action plans for improvement.

Remember, engagement isn’t a one-and-done improvement project. You’ll need to monitor employee engagement regularly and intervene based on your periodically collected data as necessary. 

There are several employee engagement tools you can use to measure engagement, and you will likely use a combination of tools to get a comprehensive picture. This “picture” will help you identify opportunities for improvement. We mentioned surveys, and these are one of the most effective tools at your disposal. You can also use HR tools, exit and stay interviews, and social media to discover engagement information.

The easiest and most effective way to collect information from your employees is through online surveys. Employees will be more likely to respond honestly if they know that their answers are anonymous. Using a tool like SurveyMonkey will support their anonymity, ensuring that your employees can respond without fear of retaliation.

Start with our employee engagement survey template and customize it with your company logo. Review, edit, add, or delete questions to ensure they apply to your organization or team. The 42-question template was written by our survey experts and includes questions about career development, work engagement, compensation, relationship management, benefits, and work environment. 

You can view real-time data as your employees submit their surveys. Our easy-to-use dashboard will help you visualize your data, analyze the results, and form your action plan based on solid data.

Survey your employees once or twice per year to evaluate engagement and revise your action plan as needed.

Human resource tools can also be helpful in measuring employee engagement. These are a few we recommend:

Workday HCM is a cloud-based human resources tool with a user-friendly, responsive interface. 

Workday HCM works in conjunction with other Workday products such as Workday Financial Management, Workday Payroll, Workday Recruiting, and more.

The features in Workday that support your measurement of employee engagement include:

Oracle Cloud HCM is another cloud-based HR solution. It is used to manage the employee lifecycle, track personal and employment information, and provide assistance for sensitive HR cases.

Regarding employee engagement, Oracle Cloud HCM helps you create and track wellness programs, competitions, volunteer opportunities, and even personal branding.

ADP Workforce Now Performance Management is a fully integrated HR software with a single database. This system helps companies assess their teams and increase engagement with easy-to-use performance tools.

This HR tool provides access to critical information across the review cycle for performance evaluation, including career paths, multi-rater feedback, and custom reporting to spot trends and risks. These insights may be used to evaluate engagement.

SAP SuccessFactors is a human experience management system that helps HR professionals transform traditional practices into engaging experiences. 

The system is designed around what employees need, how they work, and what motivates them. SAP SuccessFactors provides data-based insights to help you put the right people in the right positions, provide meaningful employee experiences, and build a highly motivated workforce.

Use SAP SuccessFactors to drive consistent employee engagement by collecting feedback at key touchpoints, leveraging built-in guided action planning to improve retention and engagement, and identifying optimal benefits packages based on employee feedback.

Employee retention is one of the rewards of employee engagement. Both exit interviews and stay interviews are critical to understanding what prompts employees to stay or leave. This information can be used to inform decisions that will improve engagement and retention.

An exit interview provides valuable information about what prompts an employee to leave your company. These interviews can be difficult, but the information you’ll learn is vital in keeping employees, especially key performers, at your business.

You may want to use a pre-exit interview survey to collect initial information, the interview itself, and then a follow-up telephone call a few weeks later to gain a complete picture of why an employee left. 

Keep meticulous notes during your exit interviews and watch for trends. These will guide your plans for improving employee engagement.

Many companies have decided to conduct stay interviews so that they don’t have to conduct exit interviews. Stay interviews are one-on-one meetings with a manager and employee with the goal of understanding why the employee is staying at the company, their vision of their future at the company, and what they think could be improved.

Questions to ask during a stay interview include:

The most critical factor in the stay interview is to take action on areas of concern. 

Gain a sense of your employees’ morale and sentiments by monitoring social media. This does not mean connecting on social sites such as Facebook. That would be overstepping a boundary. What we mean by social media is regularly checking Glassdoor reviews. Current and former employees anonymously rate companies on Glassdoor, with specific areas for benefits, salaries, etc. 

If you have a company intranet or Slack, you can monitor conversations and glean information that gives you a sense of attitudes, morale, and company culture.

Choose an employee engagement tool to get started today!

Measuring employee engagement is only the first step towards building a responsive, engaged, and forward-thinking workforce. One key step in the process is sharing the results with your managers and employees, even if those results are unfavorable. There are three main reasons why you should always disseminate the results of your employee engagement survey:

SurveyMonkey has hundreds of different analysis tools to help you visualize your data, evaluate patterns and pinpoint trends and key takeaways. But, did you know that our platform also integrates with 200+ others to help you make sense of your results? Here are seven of the best tools you can integrate into your employee engagement survey for powerful, actionable results.

Tableau is a data visualization platform. Its popularity stems from its ability to simplify large amounts of raw data, and to transform it into a format that is comprehensible to anyone at any level in your organization.

Using Tableau, non-technical users can create customized dashboards—ideal when managers want to disaggregate engagement data in a way that's specific to their department. Tableau is a powerful add-on to SurveyMonkey, allowing you to:

Ready to start? Learn more about setting up and using the Tableau integration here.

Part of the Microsoft Power Platform, Power BI is a free-to-use business analytics solution that enables you visualize your data and share insights both inside your organization and outside of it. A web browser link can be created, or you can share insights  via mobile apps for Windows, iOS, and Android. Even better: data visualizations can be embedded into your own app or website, which is handy when you want to celebrate your employee engagement levels with customers, investors, or other stakeholders.

Using SurveyMonkey’s Power BI integration, you can pull in data from your employee engagement survey, break down the results, create appealing visuals for sharing, and even incorporate data already in Power BI to help you better understand your results. One of the major benefits of this tool is that you can create collaborative workspaces where you can share reports and dashboards with colleagues. Pushing SurveyMonkey data into Power BI is a breeze—just follow this handy guide.

Like Power BI, Data Studio by Google is also a free tool for creating fully customizable dashboards and reports. You can use it to transform your raw data into interactive dashboards and visually appealing reports that are easy to understand, easy to digest, and easy to share. The number of visualization tools available is huge—in addition to pie charts and bar charts, you can add scorecards, pivot tables, and even treemaps. Data integration happens in real-time, allowing you to save time pulling reports every month, or quarter, and freeing you up to focus on executing your strategy for improving engagement.

One of the best features of Google Data Studio is that it offers a wide variety of templates for creating and sharing reports: templates with fonts that can be customized in line with your brand and items that can be added or removed. All you have to do is to load SurveyMonkey data to a database or cloud data warehouse, connect Google Data Studio, and start analyzing your data.

DataHero is a business intelligence software platform designed for sharing data insights with your team, clients, or other stakeholders. Like some of the other tools that integrate with SurveyMonkey, you can create beautiful, powerful data visualizations. But DataHero has some other benefits too: you can create visualizations of multiple surveys, allowing you, for example, to compare employee engagement results with the results from your customer surveys, or to track changes in engagement over time. If you gather survey data regularly, you’ll also find that their drag-and-drop interface makes it quick and easy to select the combination of datasets you need for sophisticated, detailed analysis. Take a look at how the SurveyMonkey DataHero integration works here.

Unlike some of the other tools we’ve considered, OfficeReports for Microsoft Office Suite isn’t free. However, you’ll find it invaluable if you’re a regular user of Microsoft PowerPoint and Microsoft Excel, because it helps you to transfer data from one to the other in moments. And with our SurveyMonkey integration, you can automatically export your survey data from the platform into Excel, ready to create charts, figures, tables or other visuals in OfficeReports, or even export the data directly into PowerPoint. What's more, OfficeReports also has the ability to automatically repopulate your spreadsheet or presentation when new survey responses come in, so you can be sure that your results are always accurate and up to date. See here for more on how to use OfficeReports with your SurveyMonkey data. 

Like some of the other tools, Dasheroo integrates with SurveyMonkey to help you create visualizations of your survey responses. A major feature of this platform, though, is that the visualizations can be automatically imported into emails that you can share on a regular basis with your team. Imagine, for instance, that you send out a quarterly employee engagement survey. You could manually export the results, perform new analysis, and send our reports every three months. When Dasheroo is connected to SurveyMonkey, you can save valuable time by automatically updating reports with new responses, and automating emails to go out to your team on a quarterly basis. In addition, you and your colleagues can upload comments on any of the visualizations, allowing you to share real-time reactions when engagement changes or a new insight emerges. Learn more about how to set up and use the Dasheroo integration here.

Finally, Crunch is a sophisticated web-based platform with an easy point-and-click interface that helps you clean, weigh, analyze, and share your data via PowerPoint or Excel quickly and easily. If you need to perform detailed, multivariate analyses, Crunch is the tool for you. And, there’s no need to download your data or keep it in a separate database: your SurveyMonkey data is securely archived and fully searchable within Crunch, and can be accessed by you and your teammates in just a click of a button. Start integrating with Crunch now.

So there you have it: why you need to capture employee engagement data, why you should share it, and more importantly—how. Ready to take the next step? Here’s how to start collecting employee data, and how to create shareable reports.

Join SurveyMonkey today to use our platform for your employee engagement surveys. For long-term solutions for your business, choose the plan that’s right for you.