9 must-have questions in employee engagement surveys

The employee engagement survey is probably the most common way for managers to understand what their teams think of their jobs and the firm that employs them.

Nearly all (92 percent) companies run employee engagement surveys, and they remain an important measuring tool: 80 percent of senior leaders believe good employee engagement is vital to achieving their business objectives, according to CEB data.

The problem is that managers from all parts of a company (from a senior IT exec to a regional product manager) have grown so accustomed to counting on the employee engagement survey for data and to chart their own contributions that they rarely pause to think about the business outcomes that the coveted increase in engagement should generate. Although teams work hard to produce the right survey, they rarely think about how it should be doing the same for them.

The wrong questions