Stay Ahead of the Curve: 8 Questions to Ask Employees to Keep Them Engaged
Soliciting feedback from your workforce will keep you in touch with the feelings and perceptions that affect the people who keep your business on track. Just by asking the right feedback questions you’ll be ahead of the curve and able to spot challenges and opportunities for your business more quickly. You’ll also have the foresight needed to adeptly address them.
The quality of your questions is just as important as asking for feedback in the first place. To assist you, we have compiled the best ten employee feedback questions for keeping businesses on track to tackle present and future challenges:
What are your top three goals for the week ahead?
Goals provide a purpose to our daily tasks. This straight-forward question opens the floor to finding out if supervisors and managers are effectively communicating team priorities and organizational purpose. It also provides an opportunity to get employees back on track if an unexpected answer is received, or discover a problem you may have been unaware of.
How do you impact the people around you?
This question invites people to strengthen their self-awareness. By being aware of their impact on colleagues and the reactions they elicit from co-workers they will be more able to improve their behavior. Change begins with awareness.
Which work-related issue keeps you up at night?
This can be a difficult question to ask and answer, but it will help you keep in touch with your employee’s feelings of job security and working relationships. If employees are worried to the extent of losing sleep over feelings of job insecurity, poor working relationships, or difficult processes, you need to know about it so that these can be resolved. Sometimes, the health of your business and employees rests on the solution.
How can we make your meetings more productive?
Efficiency of time and actions, or a lack of, impacts your bottom line. Meetings can be a drain on employee productivity and drive. Meetings without structure, too many agenda items, or little relevance for attendees served to diminish motivation rather than build engagement. Asking how to make meetings more efficient will help you unlock better employee engagement and performance.
Are you valued for your efforts? How?
Only 21% of employees feel strongly valued at work. To perform at our best we need to feel recognized and valued for the job we do. By asking this question about employee recognition, staff members are able to share their wins and let you know the ways of being recognized that matter to them most. While a shout-out at a team meeting may work for one employee, another may prefer a personal email from their supervisor.
How can we support your personal goals?
Not all of our goals are work-related. Offering support for employee’s goals outside of the office shows that you are aware there is more to their life than working for your company, and that you care about them. They will in turn repay you with additional effort at work and increased loyalty.
Do you believe you can reach your full potential here? Why?
We all desire to grow and develop our skills to reach our full potential. This question helps you to explore how your workforce feels about their opportunities for career progression and personal development. It will also help you to spot areas for expansion that employees may wish to move into.
8. On a scale of 1 – 5, where are your personal energy levels and what would it take to push them up a notch?
Healthy and energetic people get more done in less time. Plus, they are happier and nicer to be around. Asking this increases awareness of energy levels, how they impact work, and what needs to be done to increase them.
With all of these questions, it is wise to follow up in a couple of weeks to let your teams know that they weren’t asked or answered in vain. While not every suggestion and comment needs to be acted upon, it is important to show that each answer is valued. Questions help you stay ahead of the leadership curve. They keep morale high and allow you to provide the necessary support to keep everyone motivated and engaged.
Rae Steinbach, freelance editor at 15Five , is a graduate of Tufts University with a combined International Relations and Chinese degree. After spending time living and working abroad in China, she returned to NYC to pursue her career and continue curating quality content. Rae is passionate about travel, food, and writing, of course.