Introduction to motivation surveys

Motivated employees are one of the biggest assets a business can have. Not only are they personally more productive, creative and willing to take on responsibilities, their positive influence can have a beneficial impact on many other areas of an organisation.

From helping to nurture an improved team spirit and office atmosphere, to fostering a more positive view and commitment towards their employer’s goals, motivated employees help to propel a business forward by positively influencing the work climate, attitudes, customer orientation and, ultimately organisational performance.

Therefore, the ability to identify which factors are having the greatest impact on staff motivation, so you’re able to amplify or correct those that have the biggest effect, will be hugely beneficial to your organisation. And the best way to capture these insights is through running employee surveys.

How employee motivation impacts the employment lifecyle

Nearly a third of all employees say that are not motivated at work - Employeebenefits.co.uk

From initial attraction, recruitment and onboarding, to ongoing development, retention and company exit, there are a lot of stages involved in the employee lifecycle. Each can take up a considerable amount of time, resources and costs on the part of an organisation, or its HR teams.

Subsequently, the higher the number of motivated and engaged employees you have the greater the beneficial impact will be across the employee lifecycle. With highly motivated employees less likely to leave, your recruitment, onboarding and training costs are likely to be much lower. And given that news of a contented, engaged and motivated workforce is much more likely to travel far and wide, it should be easier and less costly for you to attract new talent when it’s needed too.

In fact, your most highly motivated employees will help you with this too, as it’s commonly known that they will be far more likely than other staff to recommend your organisation as a great place to work. To find out more about this and how to measure it, see the employee Net Promoter Score survey.

Benefits of measuring employee motivation

Besides the positive impact measuring motivation can have upon the key stages of the employee lifecycle, there are many wider business benefits and improvements from running employee motivation surveys too. Some key business benefits include:

Improved employee retention

Happy, motivated and engaged employees are much less likely to leave than their unhappier counterparts. Hiring is a resource intensive process that can put businesses in a challenging position, particularly if they are regularly having to replace unhappy employees, resulting in rushed recruiting, which can lead to more unsuitable people being recruited and perpetuate a continually challenging recruitment cycle.

In contrast, it’s much easier for organisations that can maintain high employee retention rates to set and accomplish long-term goals as their workforce is largely unchanging.

Increased employee performance

Individuals that feel more motivated and committed towards their employer are likely to perform to their highest level, in contract to their more unmotivated counterparts whose efforts are more likely to result in reduced output.

Therefore, the ability to gain insight into these drivers and motivators before an employee’s performance drops, can be extremely valuable in helping you to sustain a better performing and more productive workforce.

To take a deeper look into what factors could be affecting your employees’ performance, you might also consider running some employee engagement and employee benefit surveys alongside this.

Stronger organisational culture

Employee motivation can impact the attitude and behaviour of an individual, as well as those around them. So, if a large proportion of the workforce are showing signs of low motivation, this can negatively affect your organisational culture and what you’re able to achieve as a result.

However, through running an employee motivation survey, you will be in a much better position to see what the triggers are behind this and work on improvements to increase the happiness and engagement of your staff and ultimately build a stronger culture.

For a more in-depth look at what staff think about your culture you may also want to explore this with more detailed questions through an employee opinion survey.

Improved employee wellbeing

Greater efficiency and productivity are not the only benefits to result from increased employee motivation. Motivated employees are likely to experience more self-esteem, wellbeing and a more positive outlook towards their work.

As concerns about employee stress and anxiety increase, businesses that can nurture an environment that better supports wellbeing, are likely to attract and retain the best industry talent.

In addition, employee satisfaction surveys can also reveal a fair bit about an employee’s wellbeing, so you might consider running one of these too.

For 62% of the UK workforce, the salary they receive is their biggest motivation for going into work - HRmagazine.com

Employee motivation survey questions

From extrinsic factors such as work conditions, relationships (with peers, management and your leadership), pay, benefits and other incentives, to more intrinsic factors such as satisfaction with the role and responsibilities, recognition and feeling appreciated. There can be many factors that influence staff motivation, which you need to consider when you’re structuring your survey and considering what questions you want to ask.

So, to help you we’ve outlined some motivation questions for you to consider below.

At the beginning of your survey you may want to focus in on an employee’s role, to get a better feel for how motivated they are with their job, its responsibilities and the wider impact within the organisation. Suitable questions could include:

How motivated are you about your role?

How focused are you on your job duties when you’re at work?

My job is challenging and exciting.

I feel that my work is viewed and appreciated within my organisation and contributing to its overall goals.

You may then move onto analysing your employees’ relationship and views about your managers and the wider business and how this might impact their motivation levels. Suitable questions could include:

The recognition I receive from my direct line manager motivates me to do my best.

I am motivated by my organisation’s vision.

You might decide to close your survey with a few open-ended questions, just so you can get a more detailed insight into what motivates your employees the most and anything else you could do as an employer to help this process. Some questions you might like to consider include:

What is your number one motivator at work?

What could we as an organisation do to increase your job motivation?

Motivation survey best practices

Having taken the decision to develop and run motivation surveys, you’ll want to ensure you have done everything you can to maximise success and the value you’re able to obtain from them. Here’s four best practices you need to consider:

1. Think carefully about the areas you will cover in your survey

From their satisfaction with the rewards they’re given for their work efforts and their relationships with their peers, to their contentment with their role, working conditions and any recognition they receive for doing a good job. There are a lot of factors that could influence the motivation of your employees, and they tend to differ from one employee to the next. So, it’s crucial you’ve covered off all the areas that could potentially influence their motivation if you’re to achieve the best results from your survey.

2. Be careful not to introduce bias into your survey questions

Think about how you write your questions, as you don’t want to ask leading questions that will make your respondents feel there is an obvious ‘correct answer’ and end up bringing bias into your survey as a result. It can also be helpful to check your questions with small sample of respondents, prior to your main survey, just to ensure they are clear and easy to understand, which should help ensure better results when you issue your main survey.

3. Look to run employee motivation surveys frequently

From takeovers and restructuring, to redundancies and office moves. Over the lifecycle of a company there can be numerous larger events that can affect the motivation of your staff. Subsequently, besides getting their feedback to more general intrinsic and extrinsic factors, by running this survey more frequently, you’ll be to gather their thoughts, fears and concerns about larger company issues, so you can take the necessary steps to ensure their motivation is not negatively affected.

4. Be seen to act on your employees’ feedback

While it can be difficult to make all the improvements you need at once, particularly for issues that require significant time and resources to do so, it’s important to take some actions, as otherwise employees can easily become frustrated and less likely to participate in future surveys. Think about tackling simpler issues first, that you know will be quicker and easier for you to resolve.

When employees feel they belong, they’re more motivated, engaged, productive and 3½ times more likely to contribute fully and innovatively to reach their full potential - HRdive.com

Employee motivation survey software

To help maintain healthy motivation levels across your organisation, you need to be frequently surveying your employees for their feedback. But in order to do that you need to have effective HR survey software, that allows you to effectively collect, measure and analyse your employees feedback, so you can make any improvements you need to help keep their motivation and engagement levels high.

With the right platform in place this can be achieved through the following steps:

Efficiency

Swiftly develop your employee survey.

Thanks to our user-friendly software, ready-made and customisable templates, extensive question library and advanced features, it’s quick and easy to tailor your survey and questions to meet the needs of your employees.

Analysis and reporting

Know where you need to improve through strong analysis and reporting tools.

This is easy to achieve with our analysis and reporting tools. Our software helps you to quickly identify trends or correlations in your data and report back your findings to colleagues and employees with the wide range of wide range of charts and graphical formats that makes it simple for them to understand.

Convenience

Reach out quickly to your employees in a way that best suits them.

From email and web to SMS. Different employees typically prefer different platforms for accessing and completing their survey. With our wide range of distribution channels, it’s easy to reach out to your employees on their preferred channel, so they can complete their survey at a time most convenient for them.

Frequency

Trigger surveys and keep informed about employee motivation levels at crucial points on your employees’ journey.

By utilising our survey software’s automation and integration capabilities it’s easy to trigger and collect feedback about staff motivation levels at key points of your organisation’s or your employees’ lifecycle.

HR survey templates

By giving you a heads up on the structure and types of questions you should be asking, templates can help save you a lot of time and effort, particularly if this is your first employee motivation survey. Why not explore our great selection of employee survey templates.