How often should you survey employee engagement?

Up until recently, the typical employee engagement survey was sent once a year to employees across the entire company. It was usually at least 50 questions, and the results would take months to resurface. Even then they would typically be delivered as averages across the entire company. The problem with this approach was the data was stale, it was generalized across all parts of the organization, and it only reflected the single point in time that the employees were surveyed.

Now we’ve seen a lot of movement towards gathering data more frequently and generating analytics in days instead of months. Rather than sending a survey once a year, companies like Eventbrite send a one-question survey once a week. We now call these surveys the pulse of an organization. This new approach to measuring engagement generates a lot of questions amongst HR teams.

It makes sense to survey employees around engagement more often than once a year, but is it possible to survey employees too much? Even when you shorten surveys to avoid traditional fatigue, is it possible for employees to become numb to the question(s)? And does generating so much data create the risk that management teams will be pulled in ten different directions every time new survey results come in?

There are no easy answers to these questions, and there is no one right answer to how often you should be surveying employees but here are our 5 rules of employee engagement:

1. Survey employees more than once a year.
2. Produce data quickly, and give analysis to team managers.
3. The more frequent the survey the shorter it must be.
4. Make your surveys true exchange of information by giving employees insight into the way you process the data and make decisions from it.
5. Pay the most attention to teams that are trending upward or downward in their engagement scores.

What are your best tips for employee engagement surveys?

Originally published on Pomello’s Blog.