In the past HR professionals used to talk about job satisfaction, we’ve progress slightly from there to talk about employee engagement but whatever you want to call it you’re going to need to measure the impact of your engagement efforts. Historically most organisations did this once or twice a year through a survey an employee would complete. This would then indicate weak points which could be improved.

There are some fantastic questions you can ask your employees to determine how engaged they are and how they feel about work however it’s crucial that once you’ve asked the question, something is done with the answers, focus groups can be formed, cultural steering committees which include employees can be developed to further implement the learning from the qualitative research.

Engagement is a really personal thing, and you should always be thinking about how you can align your survey to the needs of the business, the needs of the employees and the culture and brand of the organisation, recognising that the answers you get won’t always be the ones you expect.

This is a list of 15 questions you might consider asking your employees to determine the levels of engagement with your business:

1. Do you believe in the values of the business?
2. Are you able to influence the results of the business?
3. Do your opinions influence the direction of the business?
4. Do you regularly find yourself being stretched in your role?
5. Are you able to learn new things in your role?
6. Are you able to achieve excellence in your day to day activities?
7. Are the people you work with talented in their roles?
8. Are you able to work autonomously without micro-management?
9. Does you line manager trust you?
10. Does your line manager care about you?
11. Have you got a best friend at work?
12. Do you socialise with your colleagues?
13. Do you work with fun people?
14. Do you regularly have fun at work?
15. Do you tell your friends and family about your job?

Engagement is different for everyone and different factors are important in different businesses, so it’s up to you to work out which questions you ask and why.

It’s a good idea to keep the questions light. It’s unlikely that every person in any organisation would answer yes for all the questions listed above however try to keep them slanted towards getting more positive than negative results as it’s easy to produce a survey that produces a negative result which if worded slightly differently could have provided a positive result.

Ultimately once you’ve conducted your survey you’ll probably want to analyse the results and maybe look into the answers in more details with focus groups, from these you can take action on any difficulties and you can use the trends in the responses to further develop your future engagement surveys.