[Music] today I want to talk about six best practices when creating an employee engagement survey number one use a subset of anchor questions to measure overall engagement the most accurate way to measure employee engagement is to use the average score from a subset of validated questions we then use the score from the anchor questions to place employees in one of four different groups from fully engaged to fully disengaged number two use a variety of questions to measure employee perceptions regarding their work their team their boss and the organization overall these items will be used to determine unique perceptions among the different engagement groups of employees also include items to measure the five major drivers of employee engagement which are meaning autonomy growth impact and connection number three use proper question structure and formatting good questions are actionable meaning that it's obvious which actions to take based on the item so avoid vague or general statements that can be interpreted in a variety of ways also don't use double-barreled questions which are items that contain two ideas and one question use questions that are positively worded with a consistent rating scale number four customize the survey so that it's relevant to your organization every organization is unique make sure to include items that evaluate recent changes alignment with company values or other pertinent issues but don't go too far if you customize too much you won't be able to utilize industry benchmarks on similar questions number five use two or maybe three open-ended questions we recommend asking what are the areas that need most improvement in our organization and what are the greatest strengths of our organization these two items generate good qualitative feedback and provide context to the scores on the other survey questions don't use too many open-ended questions because it makes the survey run long and it doesn't provide any additional feedback number six finally let's talk about survey length use between 40 to 60 questions total a survey with 50 questions takes about eight minutes to complete your survey is too short that it doesn't provide enough information to make specific conclusions and it becomes in actionable if it's too long employees won't finish it and you could also end up with too much information which leads to data paralysis to see a sample survey that includes these six best practices download the decision wise employee engagement survey thanks for watching and best of luck in your efforts to create an engaging workplace [Music]